The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

A brilliant inquiry into the origins of human nature from the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.

"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read..also highly persuasive." --Time

Now updated with a new afterword

One of the world's leading experts on language and the mind  explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.

• How the Mind Works
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
• The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century