I bought Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature last semester when researching a paper about cultural evolution. I only had time to flip through it but didn't have time to read it. But, it just barely came out in audio so now I am listening to it. It's an important topic because we could never understand human evolution if we don't acknowledge human nature. Pinker's main assertion is that political radicals in academia push this idea about the human brain being a blank slate devoid of innate structure that is molded only by experience and social interaction and that these ideas have bled over into the hard sciences. This idea is really a secular religion based on the philosophy of Marx since there is no scientific reason to assume that we aren't born with innate faculties.
One problem so far is that the name seems to be somewhat of a straw man. I don't think that everyone he criticizes really believes that the brain has no innate structure at all. He seems very offended about the biological determinist straw man that the other side uses to paint him and I can't help but think that maybe he is doing the same thing at least to some extent. However, I know that the kind of people he talks about exist. I have had some really lefty professors that didn't seem to understand how evolution works always deferring to Gould on the topic and really fit into this blank slate mentality Pinker is talking about.
Also, Pinker seems to want it both ways which makes things confusing. He repeatedly defends the writings of Herrnstein (The Bell Curve) then elsewhere says that race need not be invoked to explain differences among groups.
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