This is not meant to sugarcoat the sexual lessons of evolutionary psychology. There are no doubt arguments that will offend people: At the very pinnacle of achievement, men might prove to be, on average, better mathematicians or theoretical physicists than women. (Though women might just as easily prove more accomplished at the social interactions and empathy so critical to modern politics.) But even if evolutionary psychology does unearth some unsavory data on the sexual divide, it's essential to remember two key principles. First, we're talking about averages here, not absolutes. Men on average are more prone to violence than women, but any given woman might well be more violent than any given man. Second, and perhaps more important, the tendencies that evolutionary psychologists describe are not set in stone; violence isn't a software program that male brains are forced inexorably to run. In fact, most evolutionary psychologists shun the word "instinct" precisely because it implies something too fixed, too inescapable. Instead, they use the phrase "prepared learning." Natural selection doesn't hand down a strict playbook for action--it offers hints and clues instead. We find it easier to learn strategies that are part of our toolbox, while other strategies that weren't adaptive in our ancestral environment don't come so easily to us. You have to go to school to learn how to read, but no one goes to school to learn how to read facial expressions, although it is an incredibly sophisticated art. We're quick to develop phobias about spiders and snakes--which posed a major threat in our ancestral environments--but we rarely develop phobias about much more common twentieth-century killers, like electricity or SUVs. You're vastly more likely to be killed by a car than by a garter snake, but it's the snake that sends chills down your spine, even if you know it's harmless. Those chills are a kind of evolutionary trace memory, a message from the millions of ancestors who survived to pass down their genes partially because they had a useful fear of snakes.

But whatever we're prepared to learn can be unlearned under the right circumstances. And the fact that we're prepared to learn a certain type of behavior says nothing about the political merits of that behavior. Men may be prone to violence, but that doesn't mean we have to accept violence as a society. We overcome our so-called instincts all the time with no political repercussions whatsoever. We fly in planes and work in skyscrapers despite a fear of heights that natural selection has reasonably endowed us with. That doesn't make life at 30,000 feet immoral. It just makes it a little more difficult to pull off than life on the ground, where natural selection expected us to be.

The practical details of prepared learning--how it comes about, and how it differs from the traditional notion of instinct--is one of the most tantalizing elements of The Blank Slate. Pinker is devastating in the chapters devoted to bulldozing the blank-slate hypothesis, and he offers a fascinating, if brief, overview of the current debate among scientists researching the biology of human nature, dividing the field into "East" and "West" poles: "Cognitive scientists at the East Pole suspect that [mental] modules are differentiated largely by the genes; those at the West Pole suspect they begin as small innate biases in attention and then coagulate out of statistical patterns in the sensory input." But the book quickly switches focus to the social and political implications of the Darwinian mind, and while Pinker outlines them with characteristic eloquence and humor, the material is more familiar than the other sections, overlapping with arguments presented in Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue or even Pinker's own How the Mind Works. I suspect the book would have been even stronger if Pinker had spent more time explaining not just the politics of human nature but how we think it actually influences our behavior. There's a world of difference between telling people they're slaves to their genetic instincts and telling them that their brains are slightly biased toward learning certain skills more readily than others. The latter is undoubtedly more reassuring, but it requires a new vocabulary, somewhere between the crude reductionism of "a gene for x" and the cultural relativism of the blank slate.

Contrary to what its critics say, evolutionary psychology does not threaten our ability to assess and transform our social and cultural landscapes. Quite the opposite--understanding the particular channels that we're prepared to learn can throw into sharper relief the achievements of culture. Knowing something about our reproductive drives and our tendencies toward violence makes the extraordinary drop in murder and birthrates experienced by many Western countries over the past few centuries all the more impressive. And just because our mental modules are implicated in political issues, that's no reason to hand over our societal reins to the evolutionary psychologists. To include biological explanations in a discussion of human society by no means eliminates the validity of other kinds of explanations. What Pinker and E.O. Wilson are proposing is not biological determinism but rather biological consilience: the connecting of different layers of experience, each with its own distinct vocabulary and expertise, but each also possessing links up and down the chain:

Good reductionism (also called hierarchical reductionism) consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them. The building blocks used by one field are put under a microscope by another. The black boxes get opened; the promissory notes get cashed. A geographer might explain why the coastline of Africa fits into the coastline of the Americas by saying that the landmasses were once adjacent but sat on different plates, which drifted apart. The question of why the plates move gets passed on to the geologists, who appeal to an upwelling of magma that pushes them apart. As for how the magma got so hot, they call in the physicists to explain the reactions in the Earth's core and mantle. None of the scientists is dispensable. An isolated geographer would have to invoke magic to move the continents, and an isolated physicist could not have predicted the shape of South America.

There is no good reason that progressive politics couldn't be built on top of a comparable chain: Neuroscientists explain how the brain's underlying electrochemical networks function; evolutionary psychologists explain how and why those networks create channels of "prepared learning"; sociologists explain what happens when those channels come together in large groups of individual minds; political theorists and ethicists explore the best way to structure society based on those patterns of group behavior, and the individual needs and drives contained within them. Including a few layers of biological knowledge in this chain doesn't hijack the process; it doesn't turn us into genetically programmed robots. In fact, it might well make our cultural systems more effective by showcasing useful avenues to explore and suggesting areas where our prepared learning may create too much resistance. The more we understand our nature, the better we'll be at nurturing.

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