![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Since writing that sentence, Pinker has marshaled a panoply of other evidence to support this challenge. Modern intellectual life is suffused with a relativism that denies that there is such a thing as a universal human nature, and the existence of a language instinct in any form challenges that denial. At heart, however, The Language Instinct is about what is both common and unique to human beings. His first nonacademic book, The Language Instinct (1994), was acclaimed for its lucid and witty explanation of an ability that is so central to the human experience that few of us have ever thought about how it works. Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT, established his academic reputation by studying how children acquire the rules of grammar. Why is the idea of an inborn human nature so controversial? What does it imply about how our society should be organized, about our conceptions of equality and justice, about education, religion, the media, the arts? Would we really be better off if there were no such thing as human nature-or if we chose to ignore it? These are the questions Steven Pinker tackles in a passionately argued defense of the thesis that the natural history of our species places powerful constraints on who we are and how we think. ![]() The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature ![]()
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