The idea that we are a mix of nature and nurture would seem to be common sense by now. But as Pinker demonstrates, the nature deniers continue to argue that beyond the basic support systems--breathing, excreting--our personalities are the product of our social existence, arriving courtesy of our parents, teachers, peer groups, media, dominant ideologies and cultural norms: the product, in other words, of our history, both personal and public. This is what Pinker calls the hypothesis of the "blank slate." It is a strange sort of human exceptionalism. Unlike all the other organisms on earth, which clearly arrive with a sophisticated set of instincts designed to exploit the parameters of their environment, human minds are merely abstract learning machines, born with no innate proclivities other than to soak up information along the way. The blank slate has turned out to be a way of drawing a line in the sand against the last 150 years of Darwinian encroachments. Sure, we share a basic body plan with all the vertebrates and a respiratory system with our fellow mammals, and perhaps even 98 percent of DNA with our chimpanzee cousins. But the human mind is another matter.

Unless you're a creationist, that sort of exceptionalism should seem preposterous on the face of it: Both our brains and our bodies share a common ancestor with the apes--you can't have one and not the other. But the more interesting question--and the one Pinker spends the most time unraveling in The Blank Slate--is why that exceptionalism should prove to be so appealing to liberals and leftists who otherwise count themselves as proud defenders of the Darwinian faith. The argument for the blank slate turns out to be a strange kind of Not in My Backyardism: We need to have Darwinian theory in those Kansas schools, but we don't dare use it to understand what's going on in our own heads.

Trained as a linguistic psychologist whose specialist work has focused on irregular verbs, Pinker has made a name for himself as one of evolutionary psychology's most appealing ambassadors, with a series of bestselling books summarizing an astonishingly wide body of work: The Language Instinct (1994) looked at the mental module for language processing, first proposed several decades ago in Chomsky's idea of a generative grammar underlying all human language, and refined by subsequent developments in neuroscience and evolutionary theory. How the Mind Works (1997) extended the argument to a broader toolbox of mental modules, explaining how the mind evolved to process complex visual information, treat family members different from nonrelatives, enjoy certain types of landscapes more than others and dozens of other distinct traits. Both books were laced with implicit and explicit critiques of the blank-slate hypothesis, and How the Mind Works occasionally hinted at the political implications of overturning it. But as the title of his latest book suggests, Pinker has now brought the politics of the blank slate to the foreground. It may not convince everyone of the merits of evolutionary psychology, but it should certainly undermine the default assumption that the Darwinian theory of the mind is implicitly a reactionary one.

The weakest argument against evolutionary psychology--and the one, in my experience at least, mostly likely to be offered up during a dinner-party conversation--has always been the Nazi-baiting one: The Final Solution was built on the back of social Darwinism, which was in turn built on the back of The Origin of Species itself. From that awful lineage, the argument goes, any attempt to apply Darwinian theory to human society should be stopped in its tracks, before the inquiry runs its inevitable course to the gas chambers. Of course, if you applied this logic everywhere, you'd be renouncing much more than the neo-Darwinians: Should we abandon the germ theory of disease because the Nazis used it to justify their anti-Semitism? Stalin was certainly quite attached to the idea of worker collectives; should we renounce all modern-day labor unions because of the Gulag and the Great Purge? And, as Pinker suggests at numerous points in the book, while the Darwinian tradition was invoked to justify some horrific political ends, the blank-slate hypothesis has its own sordid past: the totalitarian regimes that believed the worker could be remade into a new kind of man, precisely because human nature was thought to be nonexistent, a malleable fiction shaped purely by historical circumstance. When people evoke the Nazis when talking about evolutionary psychology, it is the logical equivalent of responding to someone talking about the importance of culture in shaping our identity by saying: "I suppose then that you support the State separating children from their parents and forcibly re-educating them." Carry Darwinian logic to absurd extremes and you get Auschwitz. Carry the blank slate to absurd extremes and you get the Cultural Revolution. But neither history is relevant if we stay away from the extremes, if we accept that we possess a kind of dual citizenship in the worlds of nature and nurture, with both forces contributing to who we are.

The irony is that once you get past the Nazi-baiting, there is much for progressives to embrace in the sciences of human nature. Perhaps the most important is its unifying tendency, its insistence on a kind of mental toolbox shared by the most "enlightened" Westerners and the most "primitive" hunter-gatherers of Papua New Guinea.

Natural selection works to homogenize a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes--the ones that build well-functioning organs--and winnowing out the ineffective ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs. This is most obvious in the case of language, where every neurologically intact child is equipped to acquire any human language; but it is true of other parts of the mind as well. Discarding the blank slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences.

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