Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’ Was a Warning We Ignored
The same intellectual habits that once denied innate differences in the mind now deny the material realities of the body.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist, a Manhattan Institute fellow, and the CEO and editor-in-chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His work focuses on the science and public policy of sex and gender. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, The Washington Examiner, and other leading news outlets and scientific journals.
Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate seems to have aged in reverse. It was published in 2002, though I read it in 2006 when I started developing an obsession with evolutionary psychology. At the time, I viewed it as the killing blow to blank slate psychology—the notion that human nature is purely a product of social construction. The book sat on my shelf all these years as a representation of an argument that had been definitively won. But after personally battling gender ideology and sex pseudoscience for almost a decade, it now represents a warning to society that went shamefully ignored.
The intellectual habits and belief systems Pinker criticized did not disappear. Instead, they infected neighboring fields, became infused with moral dogma, and then expanded from making claims about the mind to making claims about the body itself.
Blank slate psychology has a long history. John Locke once described the human mind as “white paper” drawn on by life experience. Twentieth century behaviorists were even more extreme. John B. Watson famously claimed that, given a dozen infants and full control over their environment, he could train any one of them to become a doctor, lawyer, artist, or thief, regardless of inherited traits. This confidence in the power of conditioning spread into psychology, education, and popular culture.
Pinker’s great achievement in The Blank Slate was not simply showing that genes matter, as many competent scientists have demonstrated before. Rather, it was exposing the way that fear of human nature had distorted entire fields of study. Many intellectuals seemed to believe that simply recognizing innate differences would somehow justify unequal treatment before the law or weaken the case for social reform. Pinker argued that scientific facts must be separated from moral judgments, because if you believe that equality under the law requires everyone to be biologically interchangeable, you’re hitching your moral commitments to empirical claims that are always only one experiment away from being proven false.
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As an evolutionary biologist, I have always found the strongest version of blank slate psychology almost impossible to take seriously, because even the most cursory glance at nature shows it to be false. Put down the Women’s Studies journal article and look at data from our closest animal relatives. Simply knowing average body size differences between the males and females of a species can tell us a great deal about their likely current behavior as well as the evolutionary forces in the past that produced them. For instance, when males are a lot larger than females, as in gorillas, we generally expect intense competition among males for access to harems of females, and large differences in reproductive success as a result. When size differences are small or nonexistent, as in gibbons, we more often see males and females pairing up and less extreme competition among males. While this rule doesn’t hold in every case, it is a firmly established pattern with a sound evolutionary reasoning.
Humans did not emerge from outside nature. To believe that humans have somehow shed all our inherited tendencies requires one to hold that while every other animal has behavioral traits shaped by evolution, humans somehow lost them, only for our societies to recreate the same sex-related patterns through socialization. Why would evolution erase these tendencies only for culture to independently produce them in the same form? Why not just keep the evolved tendencies? I have yet to hear coherent answers to these questions.
Political pushback to this basic evolutionary reasoning is not new. When E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the vast majority of the book focused on nonhuman animals, where readers were presumably all nodding along to his sound and compelling arguments. But in the final chapter, he crossed what he later called the “guarded boundary” between the natural sciences and the humanities. The social justice activists of the era accused sociobiology of promoting racism, sexism, eugenics, and even genocide. At a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, protesters poured a pitcher of water over Wilson’s head while chanting that he was “all wet.”
Shockingly little has changed since then. Human evolutionary psychology—especially when applied to sex differences—is still met with strong resistance. I hesitate to call human evolutionary psychology “controversial” because the notion of evolved psychological differences between the sexes is almost universally accepted as true among evolutionary biologists. The evidence is overwhelming. We’ve since moved on to asking and answering the relevant questions downstream of that fact, like which traits differ, how large those differences are, and how biology and culture might interact.
Socialization matters, of course. I don’t know any biologists who’ve ever claimed it doesn’t. But many feminist scholars and social scientists frequently portray culture alone as a complete explanation, but strangely only for the biological differences it finds ideologically inconvenient. Colette Dowling’s The Frailty Myth, for example, argued that the athletic advantage that boys enjoy over girls are mostly produced by culture and tried to argue that strength differences mostly disappear when men and women are matched for size and training. But this simply isn’t true. Controlling for body size, males have considerably more lean mass and much greater upper-body strength. That doesn’t mean training doesn’t matter, but it does not erase sexual dimorphism.
Given that we have more than enough data to debunk blank slate psychology many times over, why didn’t Pinker’s book and the quarter-century of data generated after its publication settle the debate once and for all? Unfortunately, academia is unusually good at shielding bad ideas from outside criticism. Most scientists are busy with their own research and assume that weak arguments will remain on the fringes. This was my mindset for years. I viewed sex pseudoscience as akin to belief in a flat Earth. I only spoke up once I realized how quickly it was gaining political influence and institutional protection. This was made possible by treating disagreement as a form of harm, which isn’t really a debate tactic available to flat-Earthers.
That was my experience after I published “The New Evolution Deniers” in 2018 and began challenging the widespread denial of biological sex differences beyond the brain. Blank-slate psychology had somehow mutated into blank-slate morphology. The older and more familiar claim was that male and female minds were basically identical until society imposed gender roles on them. The new claim was that the sexes themselves were infinitely malleable social constructs that can be altered through identity, language, hormones, or surgery.
Once a field becomes protected from criticism on moral grounds, it completely loses its “self-correcting” empirical anchor and begins to drift further from reality.
Pinker has taken a different path from mine. He has remained in academia and used the enormous credibility he has built over his career to defend reason, scientific truth, and open debate on volatile topics. He is Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology and a co-leader of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom. His work on psychology, language, human nature, and rational thinking makes him unusually difficult to dismiss as a crank.
Prominent dissenters make it easier for others to speak openly. An adjunct professor can often be quietly cancelled; Steven Pinker is much harder to silence. His calm demeanor and precise style also helps. I have tried to follow the same approach of prioritizing facts over rhetoric.
Some people on the right dislike Pinker because of his strong opposition to Donald Trump. But political tribe is the wrong place to draw the line. The more important divide is between people who try to discover what is true and people who attempt to bend the facts to conform to their ideological commitments. On that question, Pinker has been one of the most ardent and consistent defenders of truth out there, and he has done so from within institutions that desperately need internal resistance.
The Blank Slate remains essential reading because the impulse it challenged never disappeared. It may never disappear. Pinker understood early that denying human nature does not make society more moral or humane, because you cannot build a better society on a false theory of humanity.
See Steven Pinker Live This September
This September, Steven Pinker brings his ideas to the stage for a series of live events across North America. Drawing on decades of work in psychology, language, human nature, rationality, and human progress, Pinker will explore the major questions that have shaped his bestselling books and distinguished academic career.
These events offer something that interviews and short lectures rarely allow: the chance to hear Pinker develop his ideas at conversational length—and to put your own questions to him during the audience Q&A.
Whether you have followed Pinker’s work for years or are simply curious about one of today’s most influential public intellectuals, this is a rare opportunity to see his clear, evidence-driven style of thinking in action.
Tour dates:
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September 13 — Montreal (TICKET LINK)
September 15 — Toronto (TICKET LINK)
Tickets and event details are available through Steven Pinker’s official website.
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I find interesting that some who do not deny the material realities of the body can end up in essentially the same political camp. I am thinking about the determinists who wish to let everyone know that there is no basis for holding anyone responsible for their acts and want to hold societies responsible if they fail to structure society based on that fact.
My only question for Professor Pinker is this: If you knew that John Money's experiment with the Reimer boys was based on this false blank slate concept, and the concept has sweeping potential for societal damage, did you call out Money, Blanchard, Zucker and all those in real time? These twins were not Jewish and David Reimer was not subjected to a botched circumcision, but rather a botched childhood surgery to correct a penile malformation. Money, a sexual predator who used his grad students sexually and photographed children in sexual play acting, used the Reimer boys to "prove" his theory that sexual identity is learned. Thus David, whose penis was tragically damaged, could be raised "as a girl." No surprise with the deaths by suicide of the Reimer twins. Why, in debates with gender ideologues, aren't these basic facts brought out into the light of day? And how is it that the abuses of women by "trans women" and their diagnosing doctors took this long to see sunlight?