When I wrote this Limerick about Steven Pinkers new book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" I wasn't saying that we are nothing but a blank slate but rather that Pinker for the sake of a commercially viable book had overstated the case for the biological component. The question never was if there was a biological basis for human nature,but how much it explains and what if fails to explain and why? Pinker slips from side to side as it suits his own prejudices. It seems I was not alone in that view. Louis Menand in a review of Pinker's book makes many of the the same points.

WHAT COMES NATURALLY
by LOUIS MENAND
Does evolution explain who we are?

"The new sciences of human nature." Well, why not? The old sciences of human nature didn't have such a fabulous track record. They gave us segregated drinking fountains, "invented spelling," and the glass ceiling all consequences of scientific theories about the way human beings really are. Possibly, there is a lesson there, which is that the sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired. Maybe this is unfair to the new sciences of human nature, though. It could be that the problem with the old sciences was simply that they weren't scientific enough that they were mostly wishful thinking projected onto dubious data about skull size and the effects of estrogen on the ability to balance a checkbook. Today's scientists might have the capacity to get right down there among the chromosomes and the neurotransmitters, and to send back reports, undistorted by fear, favor, or the prospect of funding, about what's going on. Maybe the new sciences of human nature are really scientific. It's worth a look.

And a critical look is exactly what he provides, for example:

Many pages of "The Blank Slate" are devoted to bashing away at the Lockean-Rousseauian-Cartesian scarecrow that Pinker has created.

or this:

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."

A brief aside Louis Menand is the author of one of the best books I've read in the past few
years. The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America if you are at all interested in American History, and Pragmatism in particular I can't recommend this book highly enough.