Are people inherently good? Are they social animals? Are they rational, utility-maximizing individuals? If both nature and nurture shape our characters and determine our destinies, what is the precise contribution of each? Do we have free will? These questions lie at the heart of centuries-long political, philosophical, and religious conflicts. Many of these neural circuits have been mapped by brain scans and by clinical studies of brain-damaged people.Įvolutionary psychology is addressing age-old questions about human nature. Innate brain modules exist for activities such as social learning, language, feeding, mating, and many other unconscious behaviors. These range from our tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups to our sweet tooth, which helped our ancestors select ripe fruit in a world where food was scarce, but leads to obesity for many in societies where food is abundant.

Because our brains evolved to handle problems faced by our Stone Age ancestors, some innate behaviors are maladaptive in the modern world. These neural circuits are specialized for handling different adaptive problems, and most brain functioning is unconscious. Evolutionary psychologists argue that the brain is a physical system with built-in neural circuits designed to generate environmentally appropriate behavior. To be sure, this is not your grandfather's human nature. If Pinker and his colleagues are right, it turns out that there really is an innate human nature common to all people.

Insights from evolutionary psychology are dramatically transforming the ways in which political scientists, economists, anthropologists, social psychologists, linguists, and cultural studies critics think about social and political institutions. His new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking), is likely to continue his string of publishing successes-and to keep him at the red-hot center of discussions over the meaning and implications of the increasingly important field of evolutionary psychology.Įvolutionary psychologists such as Pinker argue that the human mind, like the human body, has been designed by natural selection through the process of biological evolution. He's also the author of the bestsellers How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct.

Steven Pinker has been called 'science's agent provocateur' by the Guardian, named an 'evolutionary pop star' by Time, hailed as a 'wunderkind' by The Washington Post, and acclaimed by the London Times as both a 'world-class cognitive psychologist' and a 'stud-muffin of science.' Yet Pinker, a professor of psychology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is more than a scientific superstar.

The blank slate pinker