Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct was one of the most engaging and interesting books I've read in the last couple of years. In it, he explored the modern science of linguistics, how the human mind literally creates language, and many of its implications for how the human mind works. He also nicely skewers a lot of traditional English-language grammarians for certain "rules" he considers highly artificial, while still defending the need to teach clear writing and speaking skills.

He's recently published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is sure to be a good deal more controversial. In it, Pinker explores a wide array of science to illustrate the enormous role genetics plays in human talents and personality--and how the reaction against such notions has often held human advancement back. For a wide variety of reasons, many of us deeply fear exploring such ideas, but Pinker seeks to gently peel away these fears, explaining both where they come from and why we should not be so fearful.

I must confess that Pinker hooked me in a recent interview by saying something I've been saying for a long time now:

[In the late 20th Century,] Intellectual life was enormously affected by an understandable revulsion to Nazism, with its pseudoscientific theories of race, and its equally nonsensical glorification of conflict as part of the evolutionary wisdom of nature. It was natural to reject anything that smacked of a genetic approach to human affairs. But historians of ideas have begun to fill in another side of the picture. During the twentieth century, equally horrific genocides were carried out in the name of Marxism, such as in the mass purges and manmade famines of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and the madness in Kampuchea. The remarkable fact is that the two great ideologically driven genocides of the 20th century came from theories of human nature that were diametrically opposed. The Marxists had no use for the concept of race, didn't believe in genes, and denied Darwin's theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary adaptation. This shows is that it's not a biological approach to human nature that is uniquely sinister. There must be common threads to Nazism and totalitarian Marxism that cut across a belief in the importance of evolution or genetics. One common thread was a desire to reshape humanity. In the Marxists' case it was through social engineering; in the Nazis' case it was eugenics. Neither of them were satisfied with human beings as we find them, with all their flaws and weaknesses. Rather than building a social order around enduring human traits, they had the conceit that they could re-engineer human traits using scientific--in reality pseudoscientific--principles.

Anyone who knows me knows I write about this exact subject whenever I get the chance. Pinker got me with that if nothing else--and he should get you, too.

Anyway, Pinker is an enormously interesting fellow. In many ways I think he's the new Stephen Jay Gould, synthesizing and popularizing complex scientific ideas. Gould would probably be horrified at the comparison, since he spent much of his intellectual life trying to obscure or even dismiss concepts that Pinker fearlessly examines, and yet the comparison otherwise seems right on. The man has a knack for exploring and explaining ideas.

An interesting interview with Pinker was recently published by the "Third Culture" intellectuals over at Edge.org. The quote I used above comes from that interview. To read the rest of it, simply click here.