The euphemism treadmill shows us that it’s the concepts behind the words that matter more than the actual words themselves. He also argues against the notion of American exceptionalism by saying that America is no more violent than other countries. For example, men tend to be better at solving math word problems; women are better at mathematical calculations. Altruism is based on genetic propagation. Unfortunately, it seems that a large part of our political beliefs is in our blood: twins, separated at birth, share 0.62 (out of 1) of their political beliefs; it is because of the rest 0.38 that there are changes; education may help; • Violence. He believes that we need to ask people whether they would still be generous or kind if God told them otherwise. “The Blank Slate PDF Summary” In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker attempts to refute the theory that we are all born as a tabula rasa and to demonstrate to which extent human behavior is shaped by evolutionary and psychological adaptations. However, people are not blank slates. Access a free summary of The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker and 20,000 other business, leadership and nonfiction books on getAbstract. As you can infer from the subtitle, The Blank Slate is not one of your skim-on-the-beach or speed-read-in-your-bed just-to-pass-the-time-or-fall-asleep books. Innate intelligence is only one factor in success and doesn’t mean that success is deserved. The other three popular science books by Pinker – The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now – are much broader in scope; both optimistic and controversial, they argue that humans are continually progressing toward a better future and that they owe this progress to their genetically predefined nature. This section discusses the basic human faculty of reason and its implications. It has evolved similarly across many cultures as well. When it was discovered in 2001 that the human genome contains several times fewer genes than what neuroscientists and geneticists initially believed, the blank slate defenders were all but sure to have won a resounding victory. Steven Pinker, a well-known cognitive scientist, argues that the United States Constitution was designed to control humans’ desire for dominance and violence. Environmental factors are often used as excuses for bad behavior. The second is Authority Ranking, in which dominant individuals determine what they can take from others. This belief can make it difficult for people to change their beliefs in accordance with current scientific knowledge. For example, if we believe men are more likely than women to commit violence against women, then we could punish this behavior more harshly as a deterrent. Dubbed by some “the most important book… published in the 21st century” (psychologist David Buss) and criticized by others as a mere bashing of “the Lockean-Rousseauian-Cartesian scarecrow that Pinker has created,” The Blank Slate is, to quote a review by The Washington Post, ‘an extremely good book – clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating.”. It also conveys how we feel about those things. Pinker argues that there is no conflict between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. At getAbstract, we summarize books* that help people understand the world and make it better. This is due to biology; different hormones affect brain development and make male and female brains different. And as much as the former can be explained in terms of simple physics and mechanics, the latter is just too complicated to be translated into terms ordinary humans understand, because, well, it’s beyond our rational comprehension. We are all members of the same flawed species. Stephen Pinker discusses the concept of taboos, which are ideas that we consider so sacred that they cannot be questioned. The Tragic Vision says that humans are selfish and violent by nature.