The Blank Slate Steven Pinker

P 392 Pinker reveals what parents can indeed do to have an impact on their children. They do have the choice over what peer group they can end up in, they can provide them with the essential nurturing in their early years, and most importantly they can establish q quality relationship with them, which is priceless.

Parents can certainly harm their children by abusing or neglecting them. Children appear to need some kind of nurturing figure in their early years, though it needn't be a parent, and possibly not even an adult: young orphans and refugees often turn out relatively well if they had the comfort of other children, even if they had no parents or others adults around them. (This does not mean that the children were happy, but contrary to popular belief, unhappy children do not necessarily turn into dysfunctional adults). Parents select an environment for their children and thereby select a peer group. They provide their children with skills and knowledge, such as reading and playing a musical instrument." P 392

P 252 Pinker highlights the fundamental difference between the sexes: parental investment. Men can get away with a couple minutes of copulation, while women have to carry and nourish the offspring for years. For a male to maximize the number of his descendants, he should mate with as many females as possible; for a female to maximize the number of her descendants, she should mate with the best-quality male available. Males compete, females choose; males seek quantity, females quality.

" "Among all people's it is primarily men who court, woo, proposition, seduce, employ love charms and love magic, give gifts in exchange for sex, and use the services of prostitutes." Among western peoples, studies have shown that men seek a greater number of sexual partners than women, are less picky in their choice of a short term partner, and are far more likely to be customers for visual pornography." P 252

P 287 Pinker defines the two contrasting visions of the world, from which liberalism and conservatism have bloomed. It isn't surprising that one lens of interpreting the world leads one to accept an entire ideology, whether she be a leftist or rightist.

" in the tragic vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. In the utopian vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world." P 287

P 398 Pinker compares overly-controlling, methodical parenting to human cloning, the only difference being that such parenting is unavailing. Parent and child have a human relationship, as do spouse. Nobody believes he can change the personality of his spouse upon marrying her! One's behavior toward a child has consequences for the quality of the relationship between them.

" People are appalled by human cloning and its dubious promise that parents can design their children by genetic engineering. But how different is that from the fantasy that parents can design their children by how they bring them up? Realistic parents would be less anxious parents. They could enjoy their time with their children rather than constantly trying to stimulate them, socialize them, and improve their characters." P 398

P 437 For some perverted reason, this is apparently tantamount to accepting, forgiving, or condoning rape. I understand this sounds distasteful to someone that had been raped under such circumstances. I'm sure a mother, upon having left her kid in a crowded park in NYC, would say something similar. "I shouldn't have to worry about sex traffickers kidnapping my child." Understandable, but common sense tells us that we live in a world with some loathsome people, and they are lurking. It is true we can take measures to reduce such low-lives' proclivity to commit such loathsome acts, but given the population, such atrocities will never be zero.

" The only mentionable explanation is that college campuses, like American society in general, have a "rape culture" that glorifies and encourages the crime. Entirely taboo is a far more plausible explanation: since that men, on average, are more eager for impersonal sex than women, if you throw large numbers of young men and women together in a "sex positive" campus culture with plentiful opportunities for private drunken hook ups, encounters that verge on and shade into sexual coercion will be among the hazards." P 437

P 330 Pinker relays the correlation between the firm establishment of law and order and the decrease in violence. In order to determine the impact of policing and centralized authorities (or violence mitigators), one must compare equal societies, before and after the instantiatiob of policing and the enforcing of law on crime. By inflicting penalties on aggressors, the governing body eliminates the profitability of invading for gain. There is no honor in serving a prison sentence... though perhaps this anti police rhetoric (depicting them as a tyranny needed to be fought against), may be suscitating prison sentences as badges of honor....

" The shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60% of the men dying at the hands of other men, provide one kind of evidence. Another is the emergence of a violent culture of honor in just about any corner of the world that is beyond the reach of law. Many historians argue that people acquiesced to centralized authority during the middle ages and other periods to relieve themselves of the burden of having to retaliate against those who would harm them and their kin. And the growth of those authorities may explain the hundredfold decline in a homicide rates in European societies since the middle ages. The United States saw a dramatic reduction in urban crime rates from the first half of the 19th century to the second half, which coincided with the formation of professional police forces in the cities. The causes of the decline in American crime in the 1990s are controversial and probably multifarious, but many criminologist trace it in part to more intensive community policing and higher incarceration rates of violent criminals." P 330-331

P 371 Pinker summarizes his arguments in the chapter on Gender. The modern day feminist movement (gender feminism, or gender ideology), does detrimental damage to women in that it doesn't allow women to do what they want, instead it creates a tableau (a determined outcome) of complete egalitarianism and a genderless society, which derives from the assumption that without discrimination and patriarchal socialization, that's precisely the situation in which we would find ourselves. It therefore attacks women as victims of societal brainwashing who choose to pursue feminine careers or that are female typical. It avoids tenable solutions to serious problems like rape and instead conjures impenetrable enemies like an omnipresent patriarchy which is supported by little corroborating evidence.

" eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50% of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not." P 371

P 355 Pinker discussing the wage gap. The first scenario is unlikely, most sexist employers, despite their aversion to females, will recognize talent when they see it. The second scenario is very plausible, it makes sense, given that men and women aren't exactly indifferent to one another, to maintain the status quo of a majority male or majority female workplace. (Ex: lumberjacks or nurses). But the notion that certain fields are extraordinarily sexist towards women while others are extraordinarily sexist towards men because of a disparity in gender representation, is ridiculous.

" employers may underestimate the skills of women, or assume that an all male workplace is more efficient, or worry that their male employees will resent female supervisors, or fear resistance from prejudiced customers and clients. But the evidence suggests that not all sex differences in the professions are caused by these barriers. It is unlikely, for example, that among academics the mathematicians are unusually biased against women, the developmental psycholinguists are unusually biased against men, and the evolutionary psychologists are unusually free of bias." P 355

P 374 Pinker says that such studies are incredibly consistent. They have been replicated in many different countries at different times and continue to reap the same results. (Twin studies)

" identical twins reared apart are highly similar; identical twins reared together are more similar than fraternal twins reared together; biological siblings are far more similar than adoptive siblings. A conventional summary is that about half of the correlation and intelligence, personality, and life outcomes is heritable - a correlate or an indirect product of the genes." P 374

P 369 Pinker says that there isn't an inkling of proof that rape is a tributary of civilization and sexist societies. To the contrary, the biggest amplifier of rape is lawlessness. During peacetime, rape rates increase and decrease parallel to rates of other violent crimes. During sexist eras or in countries with extremely rigid gender roles, there is often a plummet in the rape rates.

" in the United States, for example, the rate of forcible rape went up in the 1960s and down in the 1990s, together with the rates of other violent crimes. Gender feminists blamed violence against women on civilization and social institutions, but this is exactly backwards. Violence against women flourishes in societies that are outside the reach of civilization, and erupts whenever civilization breaks down. Though I know of no quantitative studies, The targeting of sexist attitudes does not seem to be a particularly promising avenue for reducing rape, though of course it is desirable for other reasons. Countries with far more rigid gender roles than the United States such as Japan, have far lower rates of rape, and within the United States the sexist 1950s were far safer for women than the more liberated 1970s and 1980s. If anything, the correlation might go in the opposite direction. As women gain greater freedom of movement because they are independent of men, they will more often find themselves in dangerous situations." P 369

P 345 Pinker on gender. Men far more often than women take risks. There is not a great deal of overlap in this, especially, again, at the extremes. This is also why men are less often depressed than women yet more commonly commit suicide. There was once a stupid challenge called break a glass bottle on your head, which many men participated in.

" men have a higher tolerance for pain and a greater willingness to risk life and limb for status, attention, and other dubious rewards. The Darwin awards, given annually to "the individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion," always go to men. Recent honorees include the man who squashed himself under a Coke machine after tipping it forward to get a free can, three men who competed over who could stomp the hardest on an anti-tank mine and the would-be pilot who tied weather balloons to his lawn chair, shot 2 miles into the air, and drifted out to sea (earning just an honorable mention because he was rescued by helicopter)." P 345

P 390 Pinker cites the work of Harris' group socialization theory. Socialization takes place in the peer-group. Children have their own cultures, which absorb parts of the adult culture and develop values and norms of their own. Peer groups are the new society. Whether adolescents smoke, get into scrapes with the law, or commit serious crimes depends far more on what their peers do than on what their parents do.

" multi-decade, child obsessed-parenting, Harris points out, is an evolutionarily recent practice. In foraging societies, mothers carry their children on their hips or back and nurse them on demand until the next child arrives 2 to 4 years later. The child is then dumped into a playgroup with his older siblings and cousins, switching from being the beneficiary of almost all of the mothers attention to almost none of it. Children sink or swim in the milieu of other children." P 390

P 249 Pinker discusses Robert Triver's studies on Inter familiar relationships, which are not exactly sunshine and rainbows. He says despotic parents can not always be blamed for their children's outcome. He says the children don't allow their personalities to be shaped by their parents.

" natural selection should have equipped children with psychological tactics allowing them to hold their own in a struggle with their parents, with neither party having a permanent upper hand,. Parents have a short-lived advantage in sheer brawn, but children can fight back by being cute, whining, throwing tantrums, pulling guilt trips, tormenting their siblings, getting between their parents, and holding themselves hostage with the threat of self-destructive behavior. As they say, insanity is hereditary: you get it from your children." P 249

P 360 Pinker quotes some examples of the mainstream dogmas regarding rape. Rape is about power, it is the unconscious desire, implanted in men by the patriarchy and society, to exert power over women, to keep them into submission.

" rape is an abuse of power and control in which the rapist seeks to humiliate, shame, embarrass, degrade, and terrify the victim", the United Nations declared in 1993. "The primary objective is to exercise power and control over another person." This was echoed in a 2001 Boston Globe op-ed piece that said, "rape is not about sex; it is about violence and the use of sex to exert power and control... domestic violence and sexual assault are manifestations of the same powerful social forces: sexism and the glorification of violence." p 360

P 357 Pinker discusses the differences in parenting and it's effect on the wage gap between men and women. It is a fact that mothers are more attached to their children, on average, than fathers.. this is true in societies all over the world. Among hunter gatherers, women were tasked with child bearing. Although, it is very true that women often engaged in some of the gathering, and hunted (when the hunting included nets). It would be a serious inconvenience, for our female ancestors, upon having undergone the painful experience of pregnancy and giving birth, to simply accompany men in all their endeavors. It was far more efficient for women to engage in child rearing responsibilities. "In fact a recent study of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth found that childless women between the ages of 27 and 33 earn $.98 to men's dollar."

" so even if both sexes value work and both sexes value children, the different weightings may lead women, more often than men, to make career choices that allow them to spend more time with their children — shorter or more flexible hours, fewer relocations, skills that don't become obsolete as quickly — in exchange for lower wages or prestige... The economist Gary Becker has shown that marriage can magnify the effects of sex differences, even if they are small to begin with, because of what economist called the law of comparative advantage. Couples where the husband can earn a bit more than the wife, but the wife is a somewhat better parent than the husband, they might rationally decide that they are both better off if she works less than he does." P 357

P 418 Pinker says that the idea that art should reflect the perennial and universal qualities of mankind is quite elementary. Art, according to Pinker, is human nature. Nothing is more pleasing and stimulating to the mind than representations of the nuances of human nature.

" ultimately what draws us to a work of art is not just the sensory experience of the medium but its emotional content and insight into the human condition. And these tap into the timeless tragedies of our biological predicament: our mortality, our finite knowledge and wisdom, the differences among us, and our conflicts of interest with friends, neighbors, relatives, and lovers. All are topics of the sciences of human nature." P 418

P 417. Pinker speaks how science can help us better understand art, how artists achieve their affects. Why we as an audience react the way we do.

" vision research can illuminate painting and sculpture. Psychoacoustics and linguistics can enrich the study of music. Linguistics can give insight on poetry, metaphor, and literary style. Mental imagery research helps to explain the techniques of narrative prose. The theory of mind (intuitive psychology) can shed light on our ability to entertain fictional worlds. The study of visual attention and short term memory can help explain the experience of cinema. And evolutionarily aesthetics can help explain the feelings of beauty and pleasure that can accompany all these acts of perception." P 417

P 348. Pinker talks about the effects of male typical hormones in female. Unsurprisingly, upon taking male typical hormones, women become more male typical. This demonstrates quite clearly that men are far more likely to manifest such male typical traits, since testosterone, which is far higher in men, does encourage such traits.

" when women preparing for a sex change operation are given androgens, they improve on tests of mental rotation and get worse on tests of verbal fluency. The journalist Andrew Sullivan, whose medical condition had lowered his testosterone levels, describes the effect of injecting it: "the rush of a T shot is not unlike the rush of going on a first date or speaking before an audience. I feel braced. After one injection, I almost got in a public brawl for the first time in my life. There is always a lust peak - every time it takes me unaware." Though testosterone levels in men and women do not overlap, variations in level have similar kinds of affects in the two sexes. High testosterone women smile less often and have more extramarital affairs, a stronger social presence, and an even stronger handshake." P 348

P 375 Pinker discusses the 1st law of behavioral genetics "All human behavioral traits are heritable", a behavioral trait being " A stable property of a person that can be measured by standardized psychological tests." Some traits completely depend on culture, what sport you follow, what sort of clothing you like, what slang you use, what sort of food you eat. Traits that underline the why you differ from others in more broad characteristics are indeed heritable. We are definitely not blank slates.

""All traits are heritable" is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Concrete behavioral traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture are, of course, not heritable at all: which language you speak, which religion you worship in, which political party you belong to. But behavioral traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments are heritable: how proficient with language you are, how religious, how liberal or conservative. General Intelligence is heritable, and so are the five major ways in which personality can vary (summarized by the acronym OCEAN): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion/introversion, antagonism/agreeableness, and neuroticism. And traits that are surprisingly specific turn out to be heritable, too, such as dependence on nicotine or alcohol, number of hours of television watched, and likelihood of divorcing." P 375

P 254 Pinker explains how casual sexual isn't simply casual sex. He relays the preoccupations that are impregnated in us regarding sex. Again, these originate from the severe consequences of sex that were relevant to us for millions of years; it is ignorant to assume that 50 year old inventions are sufficient to suddenly reverse millions of years of sapien evolution. The fact that people are tormented by the Darwinian economics of babies they no longer have is a testimony to the long reach of human nature. Pinker also mentions how there are more people involved in the act of sex, including former lovers, real and imagined rivals, and grandparents, and siblings.

""Casual sex is not casual. Very few people are coming out unscathed." The reasons are as deep as anything in biology. One of the hazards of sex is a baby, and the baby is not just any 7 pound object but, from an evolutionary point of view, our reason for being. Every time a woman has sex with a man she is taking a chance at sentencing herself to years of motherhood, with the additional gamble that the whims of her partner could make it single motherhood. She is committing a chunk of her finite reproductive output to the genes and intentions of that man, foregoing the opportunity to use it with some other man who may have better endowments of either or both. The man, for his part, may be either implicitly committing his sweat and toil to the incipient child or deceiving his partner about such intentions." P 254

P 404 Pinker relays philosopher Denis Dutton's 7 universal signatures of art. Ironically, much of art today doesn't meet even 3 of these criteria.

"1. Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired. 2. Non-utilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art sake, and don't demand that I keep them warm or put food on the table. 3. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style. 4.Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art. 5. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world. 6. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience. 7.Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theater of imagination." P 404

P 344 Pinker discusses the 'extremes' phenomena. This is especially relevant, and explains why there is enormous over-representation of males in extreme predicaments such as in the population violent criminals, homeless, those who commit suicide CEO's, those employed in risky occupations, those in extreme math intensive fields. All the above endeavors (aside from those employed in risky occupations) are comprised of the tiniest substrata of men— the extremes or the outliers if you will— but are somehow generalized to all men in that this "male monolith" wields all the power over women, simply because a minuscule percentage of that group happens to dominate particular fields. Men are more dominant at both extremes.

"Also, confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for males is flatter and wider than the curb for females. That is, there are proportionally more males at the extremes. Along the left tail of the curve, one finds that boys are more likely to be dyslexic, learning disabled, attention deficient, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded (at least for some types of retardation). At the right tail, one finds that in a sample of talented students who score above 700 (out of 800), on the mathematics section of the SAT, boys out numbered girls by 13 to 1, even though the scores of boys and girls are similar within the bulk of the curve." P 344

P 348 So what's the pink blue theory?? It's the hypothesis that, because of differences in genitalia, this leads adults to interact differently with different babies to whom they conveniently color code pink and blue. What happens when we remove genitalia? Girls with lower levels of characteristically female hormones and higher levels of androgens (characteristically male hormones) do have more male typical preferences. Upon exposure to such high levels of characteristically male hormones, these females behave and have similar preferences as, unsurprisingly, a male....

"Androgens have permanent effects on the developing brain, not just transient effects on the adult brain. Girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia overproduce androstenedione, the androgen hormone made famous by the baseball slugger Mark McGwire. Though their hormone levels are brought to normal soon after birth, the girls grow into tomboys, with more rough and tumble play, a greater interest in trucks than dolls, better spatial abilities, and, when they get older, more sexual fantasies and attractions involving other girls. Those who are treated with hormones only later in childhood show male patterns of sexuality when they become young adults including quick arousal by pornographic images, an autonomous sex drive centered on genital simulation, and the equivalent of wet dreams." P 348

P 411 Pinker introduces postmodernism, which stemmed from modernism, a rejection of traditional forms of art. Postmodernism took it a step further, and rejected objective truths and objective reality, that no perspective is privileged over another.

"Beginning in the 1970s, the mission of modernism was extended by the set of styles and philosophies called postmodernism. Postmodernism was even more aggressively relativistic insisting that there are many perspectives on the world, none of them privileged. It denied even more vehemently the possibility of meeting, knowledge, progress, and shared cultural values. It was more Marxist and far more paranoid, asserting that claims to truth and progress were tactics of political domination which privileged the interests of straight white males. According to the doctrine, mass produced commodities and media disseminated images and stories were designed to make authentic experience impossible." P 411

P 306-307 Pinker says that it doesn't look good to the anthropologists of peace the findings of our prehistoric ancestors. Violence is part of human nature, it is unnatural (but necessary) to reduce it. Pinker mentions that prehistoric and modern foragers are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casualties from *our world wars*.

"Buried in the ground and hidden in caves lie silent witnesses to a bloody prehistory stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. They include skeletons with scalping marks, axe-shaped dents, and arrowheads embedded in there; weapons like tomahawks and maced that are useless for hunting but specialized for homicide; fortification defenses such as Palisades of Sharpened sticks; and paintings from several continents showing men firing arrows, spears, or boomerangs at one another and being felled by those weapons.... In an 850 year old site in the American Southwest, archaeologists have found human bones that were hacked up like the bones of animals used for food. They also found traces of human myoglobin (a muscle protein), on pot shards, and — damningly — in a lump of fossilized human excrement." P 306-307

P 338 Pinker discusses the technological and economic revolutions that lessened the division of labor, where women devoted every moment to domestic work. Thanks to modernization and yes, free markets, women were able to experience a home and work life balance while having children.

"Clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine lowered infant mortality and reduced the desire for large breeds of children. Baby bottles and pasteurized cows milk, and then breast pumps and freezers, made it possible to feed babies without their mothers being chained to them around the clock. Mass production made it cheaper to buy things then to make them by hand, and plumbing, electricity, and appliances reduced the domestic work load even more." P 338

P 350 In response to the Pink-Blue theory, (the erroneous belief that due to differences in genitalia, parents and society are lead to interact differently with different babies who are in turn color coded to pink and blue). Pinker has already presented evidence that removes the variable of genitalia, showing the effects of raising or lowering characteristically male and characteristically female hormones in both respective sexes. High levels of testosterone in women cause them to act more male typical, just as lower estrogen levels in women makes them more typical. If that is not enough, parents do not in fact treat their children very differently depending on their sex, as is shown below. Gender decronstructionists are beginning to look like conspiracy theorists.

"Contrary to popular belief, parents in contemporary America do not treat their sons and daughters very differently. A recent assessment of 172 studies involving 28,000 children found that boys and girls are given similar amounts of encouragement, warmth, nurturance, restrictiveness, discipline, and clarity of communication. The only substantial difference was that about 2/3 of the boys were discouraged from playing with dolls, especially by their fathers, out of fear that they would become gay. (Boy who prefer girls' toys often do turn out gay, but forbidding them the toys does not change the outcome.) Nor do differences between boys and girls depend on their observing masculine behavior in their fathers and feminine behavior in their mothers. When Hunter has two mommies, he acts just as much like a boy as if he had a mommy and a daddy." P 350

P 386 Wow, is parenting really so trivial? To my judgement, these studies imply that aside from severe neglect and abuse, parenting does not have as strong an impact on the future personality of the child. It is important, to have a good relationship with the child, just as one would have a good relationship with her spouse.

"Decades of studies have shown that, all things being equal, children turn out pretty much the same way whether their mothers work or stay at home, whether they are placed in daycare or not, whether they have siblings or are only children, whether their parents have a conventional or an open marriage, whether they grew up in an Ozzie/and-Harriet home or a hippie commune, whether their conceptions were planned, or accidental, or took place in a test tube, and whether they have two parents of the same sex or one of each." P 386

P 341 Pinker differentiates equity feminism from gender feminism. Gender feminism is a commitment to achieving a fixed result. It is a commitment to to the blank slate hypothesis that obligates it to contrive a very particular freedom. "Until there are no differences between men and women, until we find 50-50 representation, until the rape rate has dwindled down to zero, we live in an oppressive patriarchy in which men have all the power."

"Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive — power — and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups - in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender." P 341

P 341 Pinker discusses Christina Hoff Sommer's book, "who stole feminism", and defines both equity feminism and gender feminism, gender feminism haven risen to dominance in recent years. It is the doctrine present in the humanities and politics, which stems from the idea that humans are blank slates, with very little inherent qualities, and that it is our moral imperative to decronstruct ourselves, to liberate women from such bondage, and rewrite a more egalitarian society.

"Equity feminism opposes sex discrimination and other forms of unfairness to women. It is part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition that grew out of the enlightenment, and it guided the first wave of feminism and launched the second wave. Gender feminism holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in which "bisexual infants are transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other will be." P 341

P 363 Pinker quotes equity feminist Wendy McElroy. According to mainstream dogma, rape is a tool used to exert power over women, to force them into submission. Culture teaches men to rape and glorifies rape. This is a ridiculous notion on many levels. To start out, it doesn't seem to make much sense that a very small sub-strata of men are indifferent to rape, while others are completely abhorred to it. Culture seems to effect some men, other men not so much. Secondly, a rapist in a traditional society, risks torture, mutilation, and death at the hands of her relatives. In a modern society, he risks a long prison term. Is he really assuming these risks as an altruistic sacrifice to benefit the rest of the male gender? Rapists are in no way uplifted in society. There is no war between the sexes; as if men don't have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, whom they care for more than most other men.

"Even the most loving and gentle husband, father, and son is a beneficiary of rape of women they love. No ideology that makes such vicious accusations against men as a class can heal any wounds. It can only provoke hostility in return." P 363

P 367 Pinker relays rape research done by Thornhill and Palmer, "a natural history of rape", who argue that rape could have been selected for. They say it is not a typical mating strategy but rather an opportunistic tactic more likely utilized when the man is unlikely to win the consent of the women, alienated from q community, and safe from detection and punishment. They then describe manners in which males attempt to overcome the woman's relaxation, which has always been an obstacle for men to overcome.

"His usual tactics may include being kind, persuading the woman of his good intentions, and offering the proverbial bottle of wine, but may become increasingly coercive as certain risk factors are multiplied in: the man is a psychopath (hence insensitive to the suffering of others), an outcast (hence immune to ostracism), a loser (with no other means to get sex), or a soldier or ethnic writer who considers an enemy subhuman and thinks he can get away from with it. Certainly most men in ordinary circumstances do not harbor a desire to rape. According to surveys, violent rape is unusual in pornography and sexual fantasies, and according to laboratory studies of men's sexual arousal, depictions of actual violence toward a woman or signs of her pain and humiliation are a turn off." P 367

P 355 Pinker describes how the menu of opportunities for high paying jobs right now favors male typical traits. Though certain ephemeral traits, such as vampishness, more common in females, can give one a leg up. He quotes anthropologist Helen Fisher, who speculated that the culture of business could change to favor women on a population level. Women could surpass men in economic status and earnings. In summary, given the differences between men and women (some biological and others cultural), the chance that the proportion of men and women in any field is identical, will be practically zero.

"If there are more high paying jobs that call for typical male strengths (say, willingness to put oneself in physical danger, or an interest in machines), Men may do better on average; if there are more that call for female typical strengths (say, a proficiency with language, or an interest in people), women may do better on average. In either case members of both sexes will be found in both kinds of jobs, just in different numbers." P 355

P 304 Pinker says it's important to the poor of today are far better off than any poor people have been at any other time in history. That being said, status may be a serious contributor to our well being, and in light of the increasing disparities of wealth in our society, this could certainly cause some inevitable resentment and deep offense.

"In absolute terms, today's poor are materially better off than the aristocracy of just a century ago. They live longer, are better fed, and enjoy formerly unimaginable luxuries such as central heating, refrigerators, telephones, and round the clock entertainment from television and radio. But if people's sense of well-being comes from an assessment of their social status, and social status is relative, then extreme inequality can make people in the lower rungs feel defeated even if they are better off than most of humanity." P 304

P 247 Pinker stresses that nepotism is an innate property of human nature. That being said, due to the creative power of Sapiens, humans also have the capability of creating myths— thoroughly engrossing and moving— that bind thousands and sometimes millions of people together towards a common cause. Fiske says that this is accomplished through the mass adoption of sets of ideas attempting to explain the world, known as ideologies. Ideologies can be religious, political, or spiritual, but most are aberrations from reality— or at least over-simplifications of it. Essentially, Pinker is saying that the only manner of uniting a social group is by thinking of it as a family, an attempt to redirect familial emotions to that group. (Brethren, fraternity, brotherhood, sorority, crime families, etc)

"In his ethnographic survey, Alan Fiske shows that the ethos of communal sharing (one of his 4 universal social relations), arises spontaneously among the members of the family but is extended to other groups only with the help of elaborate customs and ideologies. Unrelated people who want to share like a family create mythologies about a common flesh and blood, a shared ancestry, and a mystical bond to a territory (tellingly called a natal land, fatherland, motherland, or mother country). They reinforce the myths with sacramental meals, blood sacrifices and repetitive rituals, which submerge the self into the group and create an impression of a single organism rather than a Federation of individuals. Their religions speak of possession by spirits and of other kinds of mind melds, which, according to Fiske, "suggest that people may often want to have more intense or pure communal sharing relationships than they are able to realize with ordinary human beings." The Darkside of this cohesion is groupthink, a cult mentality, and myths of racial purity — the sense that outsiders are contaminants who pollute the sanctity of the group." P 247

P 257 Pinker provides examples of how utopian communities throughout the 19th and 20th century have exposed themselves. We see Amish people today, some of them (depending on their degree of devotion), living in 'enclosed' communities. But you'll quickly realize this is not a good example if you put a few brain cells to work. Our language is riddled with reciprocity: Obligation, debt, favor, bargain, contract, exchange, deal...

"In the 19th century and early decades of the 20th, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of 20 years." P 257

P 289 Pinker breaks down the tragic vision. This is a simulacrum of the white side of the yin and yang symbol. This is pure order, complete prudishness, but yes pragmatism and circumspection as well. Slow to make changes, tolerant of the status quo. This vision is of course necessary, the game of tug and war between both visions is necessary for progress without going off the rails. One vision mustn't monopolize a society or government.

"In the tragic vision, moreover, human nature has not changed. Traditions such as religion, the family, social customs, sexual mores, and political institutions are a distillation of time tested techniques that let us work around the shortcomings of human nature. They are as applicable to humans today as they were when they developed, even if no one today can explain the rationale. However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future. We are fortunate enough to live in a society that more or less works, and our first priority should be not to screw it up, because human nature always leaves us teetering on the brink of barbarism And since no one is smart enough to predict the behavior of a single human being, let alone millions of them interacting in a society, we should distrust any formula for changing society from the top down, because it is likely to have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems it was designed to fix. The best we can hope for are incremental changes that are continuously adjusted according to Feedback about the sum of their good and bad consequences. It also follows that we should not aim to solve social problems like crime or poverty, because in a world of competing individuals one person's gain may be another person's loss." P 289

P 289 Pinker elaborates on the utopian vision. As with the tragic vision, the utopian vision has many admirable traits mixed in with capricious and imprudent ones. To accept aspects of the utopian vision is necessary for progress, discovery, survival, for the human condition. To marry oneself completely too it will lead one to have contempt towards dialogue and free thought.

"In the utopian vision, human nature changes with social circumstances, so traditional institutions have no inherent value. That was then, this is now. Traditions are the dead hand of the past, the attempt to rule from the grave. They must be stated explicitly so their rationale can be scrutinized and their moral status evaluated. And by that test, many traditions fail: the confinement of women to the home, the stigma against homosexuality in premarital sex, the superstitions of religion, the injustice of apartheid and segregation, the dangers of patriotism as exemplified in the mindless slogan "my country, right or wrong." Practices such as absolute monarchy, slavery, war, and patriarchy once seemed inevitable but how disappeared or faded from many parts of the world through changes in institutions that were once thought to be rooted in human nature. Moreover, the existence of suffering and injustice presents us with an undeniable moral imperative. We don't know what we can achieve until we try, and the alternative, resigning ourselves to these evils as the way of the world, is unconscionable." P 289

P 346 Pinker continues to shatter the Pink and Blue theory. He explains how evolutionary biologists understand how the competitive edge and proclivity towards polyamory could have developed in men while greater selectivity and and a greater inclination towards child rearing and sociality could have evolved in women. The difference in sexual investment was relevant for millions of years. Birth control has been around for 50. To deny that millions of years of differences in sexual investment of males and females didn't lead to the differences in how men and women perceive sex, dating, and raising children, is a preconception in denial of evolutionary biology and logic in general.

"Many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly what an evolutionary biologist who knew only their physical differences would predict. Throughout the animal kingdom, when the female has to invest more calories and risk in each offspring (in the case of mammals, through pregnancy and nursing), she also invests more in nurturing the offspring after birth, since it is more costly for a female to replace a child than for a male to replace one. The difference in investment is accompanied by a greater competition among males over opportunities to meet, since meeting with many partners is more likely to multiply the number of offspring of a male then the number of offspring of a female. When the average male is larger than the average female, as is true of men and women, it bespeaks an evolutionary history of greater violent competition by males over mating opportunities. Other physical traits of men, such as later puberty, greater adult strength, and shorter lives, also indicate a history of selection for high-stakes competition." P 346

P 344 Pinker just gives a couple differences seen on a global scale between men and women. First study is from Salmon snd Symons, 2001; and Symons, 1979. Second is from Daly and Wilson, 1988. "Surgery Anecdote from Barry, 1995. These differences don't make men better than women, or vice versa. Just simply show that some traits are more commonly found among men on a population level.

"Men have a much stronger taste for no strings sex with multiple or anonymous partners, as we see in the almost all male consumer base for prostitution and visual pornography. Men are more likely to compete violently, sometimes lethally, with one another over steaks great and small (as in the recent case of a surgeon and an anesthesiologist who came to blows in the operating room while the patient lay on the table waiting to have her gallbladder removed). Among children, boys spend Far more time practicing for violent conflict in the form of what psychologist genteelly call "rough and tumble play". The ability to manipulate three-dimensional and space in the mind also show a large difference in favor of men." P 344

P 433 Pinker quotes an excerpt of dialogue from the book "enemies, a love story." (I took a picture of the scene). It is very true, sometimes art explains the human condition better than an academic textbook. Though it doesn't articulate exactly what the human condition is, it leaves us an impression of it, and in turn, we understand it, we nod and say, "this is it, this is life." It can make us laugh or cry.

"Men's inclination to polygamy and the frustrations it inevitably brings. Women's keener social intelligence and a preference for verbal over physical aggression against romantic rivals. The stability of personality over the lifespan. The way that social behavior is elicited by the specifics of the situation, especially the specifics for other people, so that two people play out the same dynamic whenever they are together." P 433

P 310 Pinker discusses violence, he says there is little to no correlation between gender roles/sexist cultural attitudes and violence within a society. Additionally, he reminds us that parents don't shape their children into violent animals, adoption studies showing genes having a stronger affect than parenthood show this. He also says that violence in Hollywood or in media exposure in no way glorifies school shooters or violent abusers, but rather showcases heroes ready to use violence for a just cause. This is something that is universal. Lastly, there is no "culture of masculinity" leading to violence in our culture. There exists an exposure to violence, sure, but rather yet is accompanied to an exposure to clowns, folk singers, drag queens. Our culture doesn't put a higher value on violent people than these other types.

"Most countries in the third world, and many of the former Republics of the Soviet union, are considerably more violent, and they have nothing like the American tradition of individualism. As for cultural norms of masculinity and sexism, Spain has its machismo, Italy it's braggadocio, and Japan it's rigid gender roles, yet their homicide rates are a fraction of that of the more feminist influenced United States. The archetype of a masculine hero prepared to use violence in a just cause is one of the most common motifs in mythology, and it can be found in many cultures with relatively low rates of violent crime. James Bond, for example - who actually has a license to kill — is British, and martial arts films are popular in many industrialized Asian countries." P 310

P 356 To deny biological differences between men and women would be foolish, but even if one does deny the mounds of evidence to support such differences, it would be doubly foolish to believe, (due to differences in preferences and willingness to take risks and undergo more physical labor), that men and women should be equally or even more equitably represented in all fields.

"On average, men's self-esteem is more highly tied to their status, salary, and wealth, and so is their attractiveness as a sexual partner and marriage partner, as revealed in studies of what people look for in the opposite sex. (Buss and Ellis 1992) Not surprisingly, men say they are more keen to work longer hours and to sacrifice other parts of their lives - to live in a less attractive city, or to leave friends and family when they relocate - in order to climb the corporate ladder or achieve notoriety in their fields. Men, on average, are also more willing to undergo physical discomfort and danger, and thus are more likely to be found in grungy but relatively lucrative jobs such as repairing factory equipment, working in oil rigs, and jackhammering sludge from the inside of oil tanks. Women, on average, are more likely to choose administrative support jobs that offer lower pay in air-conditioned offices. Men are greater risk takers, and that is reflected in their career paths even when qualifications are held constant. Men prefer to work for corporations, women for government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Male doctors are more likely to specialize and to open up private practices; female doctors are more likely to be general practitioners on salary in hospitals and clinics. Men are more likely to be managers in factories, women more likely to be managers in human resources or corporate communications." P 356

P 371 Pinker introduces a legitimate viable solution to the problem of rape. The studies show that chemical castration makes a significant difference in a rapists inclination towards a repeated offense. Lamentably, however, the gender feminist movement proposes that rape is about suppressing women in an act of power and sadism. Therefore, according to such feminists, we should ignore such solutions (despite shown to be effective) as they contradict the idea that rape has nothing to do with sexual gratification. This ideological feminist movement (that adheres to a set of dogma that can't be departed from even if it means sparing potential rape victims) seems to do nothing for the cause of women. The ideology is more important.

"One example is "chemical castration," voluntary injections of the drug Depo-Provera, which inhibits the release of androgens and reduces the offenders sex drive. It is sometimes given to offenders who are morbidly obsessed with sex and compulsively commit crimes such as rape, indecent exposure, and child abuse. Chemical castration can cut recidivism rates dramatically — in one study, from 46% to 3%.... People may have to decide which they value more, an ideology that claims to advance the interests of the female gender or what actually happens in the world to real women." P 371

P 269 Pinker begins to discuss morality. He states that contrary to the assumption that a biological understanding of the mind leads to nihilism, understanding our mind biologically illuminates to us that we may have *too much* morality. Pinker chronicles several stories which include incest, flag burning, eating an already dead dog, and having sexual intercourse with a dead chicken before cooking it, all particular acts having to consequences to the individual (as is specified in the stories), nor to anyone else. All are private acts among consenting adults. People's moral sense tends to feel repulsion towards such abnormal acts, perhaps even more so than towards an act such as usury, thievery, or murder. The human mind all too easily equates prestige and purity with morality.

"People have a gut feeling that give them empathetic moral convictions, and they struggle to rationalize the convictions after the fact. These convictions may have little to do with moral judgments that one could justify to others in terms of their affects on happiness or suffering. They arise instead from the neurobiological and evolutionarily design of the organs we call moral emotions." P 271

P 274 Our "moral" sense has caused us to shudder at many things that aren't even slightly immoral. Logic and reason always triumphs emotional gut feelings. That being said, I do believe that we should maintain a certain level of purity and prestige within society. Being impure or non-prestigious at an individual level may be completely harmless, and we shouldn't judge those who fall into such categories. But the attempt to impregnate society with impurity, in other words, to wish to expunge all taboos or social norms from society—- I don't think is a good idea.

"People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of standards of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a person of color, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men... The difference between a defensible moral position and an atavistic gut feeling is that with the former we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. We can explain why torture and murder and rape are wrong, or why we should oppose discrimination and injustice." P 274

P 311 Pinker continues to derail the proposition that exposure to media violence is a cause of crime rates. He mentions that as violent video games surged the nation, there was no concomitant rise of violence; countervailingly, it dropped. Obviously this is not to say the violent video games decreased violence.

"People were more violent in the centuries before television and movies were invented. Canadians watch the same television shows as Americans but have a fourth of their homicide rate. When the British colony of Saint Helena installed television for the first time in 1995, its people did not become more violent. Violent computer games took off in the 1990s, time with crime rates plummeted." P 311

P 324-325 Pinker introduces the Law of Retaliation, which originated as a means to ameliorate the conflict of violence known as the "Hobbesian Trap", the need to realize a preemptive strike over a rival individual, gang, or nation. Lack of agreement, communication, or an established intermediary, can lead to tool competition, in preparation for a potential preemptive strike. Most urban crime statistics list "argument@ as the most frequent cause of violent altercations, usually over trivial status disputes.

"Readiness to inflict a preemptive strike is a double edge sword, because it makes one an inviting target for a preemptive strike. So people have invented, and perhaps evolved, an alternative defense: the advertised deterrence policy known as Lex talionis, the law of retaliation, familiar from the biblical injunction "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth... Studies of feuds, wars, and ethnic violence show that the perpetrators are almost always inflamed by some grievance against their targets. The danger inherent in the psychology is obvious: two sides may disagree over whether an initial act of violence was justified (perhaps as an act of self defense, the recovery of ill gotten gains, or retribution for an earlier offense), or was an act of unprovoked aggression." P 324-325

P 255 Pinker explains the innate inclination to reciprocity— on a social scale, reciprocal altruism. Humans will give on the contingency that they are rewarded by their peers some time in the near future. Pure altruism is left vulnerable to invasion by cheaters... people on a population level will not benefit the group at the expense of the self.

"Reciprocators who help others who have helped them, and who shun or punish others who have failed to help them, will enjoy the benefits of gains in trade and outcompete individualists, cheaters, and pure altruists. Humans are well-equipped for the demands of reciprocal altruism. They remember each other as individuals (perhaps with the help of dedicated regions of the brain), and have an eagle eye and a fly paper memory for cheaters. They feel moralistic emotions — liking, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, shame, and anger." P 255

P 346 Pinker begins to explain why the pink and blue theory, (the idea that differences in genitalia leads adults to interact differently with babies which, in turn, leads babies to be socialized into men and women), just doesn't seem to credible... Pinker explains the universality of such gender differences.

"Sex differences are not an arbitrary feature of western culture, like the decision to drive on the left or on the right. In all human cultures, men and women are seen as having different natures. All cultures divide their labor by sex, with more responsibility for child rearing by women and more control of the public and political realm by men. (The division of labor emerged even in a culture where everyone has been committed to stamping it out, the Israeli Kibbutz). In all cultures men are more aggressive, more prone to stealing, more prone to lethal violence (including war), and more likely to woo, seduce, and trade favors for sex. In all cultures one finds rape, as well as proscriptions against rape." P 346

P 299 Pinker lists that many social conventions are indeed dependent on the time and place, and reasons for their prevalence are obsolete today, hence why we don't practice them any longer.

"Some traditional institutions, like families and the rule of law, may be adapted to eternal features of human psychology. Others, such as primogeniture, were obviously adapted to the demands of the feudal system that required keeping the family lands intact, and became obsolete when the economic system changed in the wake of industrialization. More recently, feminism was in part a response to provoke reproductive technologies and the shift to a service economy. Because social conventions are not adapted to human nature alone, a respect for human nature does not require reserving all of them." P 299

P 264 According to Trivers, natural selection doesn't necessarily favor nervous systems that produce accurate images of the world. We lie to ourselves and to others. We create ideals, goals, dreams, very unlikely to ever come to fruition, and we are aware of that. We are almost mechanized to lie. A part of the mind must be designed to believe its own propaganda.

"Sometimes parents may want to convince a child that what they are doing is for the child's own good, children may want to convince parents that they are needy rather than greedy, lovers may want to convince each other that they will always be true, and unrelated folks may want to convince one another that they are worthy cooperators." P 264

P 300 Pinker quotes Singer, who says that it's time we take seriously the fact that we are evolved animals, that we bear the mark of our ancestors, not only in our anatomy and DNA, but also in our behavior. Another note, understanding human nature is practical in being able to make incremental progress. Without an understanding of the "why", there is no clear path to ameliorating a social problem. Simply making invidious comparisons doesn't resolve anything.

"Specific components of human nature include self interest, which implies that competitive economic systems will work better than state monopolies; the drive for dominance, which makes powerful governments vulnerable to overweening autocrats; ethnocentrism, which puts nationalist movements at risk of committing discrimination and genocide; and differences between the sexes, which temper measures for rigid gender parity in all walks of life." P 300

P 315 Pinker evaporates the moralistic fallacy; it isn't necessary to claim that something is unnatural because it is immoral. Often times, and particularly in our ancestral environment, violence and harm against others does serve the individual. We could certainly have evolved a violent nature. "Killing one's adversary is the ultimate conflict resolution technique." Pinker says there is little doubt that men are more prone to violence than women, that young men are more prone to violence than old men, and that an even more narrow group of young men are far more prone to violence than other young men. And such individuals usually have a distinct psychological profile, which include traits that are largely heritable....

"Take man, for starters: across cultures, men kill men 20 to 40 times more often than women kill women. And the lion share of the killers are young men, between the ages of 15 and third. Some young men, moreover, are more violent than others. According to one estimate, 7% of young men commit 79% of repeated violent offenses. Psychologist find that individuals prone to violence have a distinctive personality profile. They tend to be impulsive, low intelligence, hyper active, and attention-deficient. They are described as having in "oppositional temperament": they are vindictive, easily angered, resistant to control, deliberately annoying, and likely to blame everything on other people. The most callous among them are psychopaths, people who lack a conscience, and they make up a substantial percentage of murderers. These traits emerge in early childhood, persist through the lifespan, and are largely heritable, though nowhere near completely so." P 315

P 319 Pinker cites Robert Trivers' work on the primeval root of male violence, competition over females, which he labels "a scarce commodity." This is a motif commonly alluded to in great works of art, men going to great lengths to conquer the female. The second quote is from Daly and Wilson. Without reciprocity, violence is a very effective method of surviving and propagating one's dna.

"The difference in the minimal parental investment of males and females makes the reproductive capacity of females a scarce commodity over which males compete. This explains why men are the violent gender, and also why they always have something to fight over, even when their survival needs have been met. Studies of warfare in pre-state societies have confirmed that men do not have to be short of food or land to wage war. They often raid other villages to abduct women, to retaliate for past abduction, or to defend their interests in disputes over exchanges of women for marriage. "Any creature that is recognizably on track towards complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory." Impoverished young men on this track are therefore likely to risk life and limb to improve their chances in the sweepstakes for status, wealth, and mates." P 319

P 370 Pinker quotes feminists Camille Paglia and McElroy. One can understand the repugnance at the suggestion that an attractively dressed woman excites an irresistible desire to rape, or that the culpability should be partially shifted to the woman. The culpable one is clearly the rapist. Women clearly have the right to dress any way they please, but the issue is not what they have the right to do, but what they can do to maximize their safety in the given world. Sexual assault is an act of sexual gratification, that doesn't make it any less abhorrent. This is common sense to take precautions in an imperfect world.

"The fact that women are vulnerable to attack means we cannot have it all. We cannot walk at night across an unlit campus or walk down the back alley, without incurring real danger. These are things every woman should be able to do, but "shoulds" belong in a utopian world. They belong in a world where you drop your wallet in a crowd and have it returned, complete with credit cards and cash. A world in which unlocked porches are parked in the inner city. And children can be left unattended in the park. This is not the reality that confronts and confines us." P 370

P 349 Pinker details the story of an 8 month old boy who lost his penis who was then raised as a girl. This was subsequently used as proof that babies are gender neuter and acquire a gender through intense socialization and reinforcement based on their genitalia. Pinker reveals the full facts. You cannot socialize a child to the gender of your desire. You can socialize one to express or suppress their gender; in the case of Brenda, given that fact that she was born male, this is especially harmful, given the likelihood that she would be male typical.

"The facts were suppressed until 1977, when it was revealed that from a young age Brenda felt she was a boy trapped in a girls body and gender role. She ripped off frilly dresses, rejected dolls in favor of guns, preferred to play with boys, and even insisted on urinating standing up. At 14 she was so miserable that she decided either to live her life as a male or to end it, and her father finally told her the truth. She underwent a new set of operations, assumed a male identity, and today is happily married to a woman." P 349

P 316 Damning to the idea that humans are socialized into violence. To those that retort, saying "but look, since violence among girl toddlers and boys toddlers is hardly disparate, shouldn't that translate into adulthood?" I respond that this reveals a complete disregard for puberty, which does produce quite a dispare effect on the two sexes. If toddlers were handed weapons, they'd slaughter one another.

"The most violent age is not adolescent but toddlerhood: in a recent large study, almost half the boys just past the age of two, and a slightly smaller percentage of the girls, engaged in hitting, biting, and kicking." P 316

P 294 Pinker says that in his view the new sciences of human nature vindicate some version of the tragic vision is undermine the utopian outlook. He lists the following discoveries as reasons for why the vision that human nature will radically change in some imagined society of the remote future is unlikely.

"The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance. -The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented. -The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceful hunter gatherers), and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it. -The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face in inherent trade off between equality and freedom. -The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving bias is, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity. -The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty." P 294

P 349 Pinker continues to reveal studies that simply dissipate the idea of gender being a social construct. What are the odds that without being aware of their sex, and moreover, and receiving encouragement for adopting behaviors and attitudes typical of the opposite sex, that these boys would ALL show exhibit male typical behavior, including over half of them declaring themselves as boys?? It's almost as if gender and sex aren't disconnected after all.

"The ultimate fantasy experiment to separate biology from socialization would be to take a baby boy, give him a sex change operation, and have his parents raise him as a girl and other people treat him as one. If gender is socially constructed, the child should have the mind of a normal girl; if it depends on prenatal hormones the child should feel like a boy trapped in a girls body. Remarkably, the experiment has been done in real life - not out of scientific curiosity, of course, but as a result of disease and accidents. One study looked at 25 boys who were born without a penis (a birth defect known as cloacal exstrophy), and who were then castrated and raised as girls. All of them showed male patterns of rough and tumble play and had typically male attitudes and interests. More than half of them spontaneously declared they were boys, one when he was just five years old." P 349

P 345 Pinker continues to shed light on differences between men and women. For the upteenth time, these differences are not universal. There is a great deal of overlap. These are just explanations as to why we should not expect 50-50 representation in every ambit of society, especially at the extremes. No, it does not give me any special pride to know that men make more than women on average. I happen to study something that is female dominated, and has a lower average salary than certain male dominated fields. Am I an embarrassment to my gender? No, not at all, all I know is that I'm more comfortable studying journalism than majoring in STEM.

"Though men on average, or better and mentally rotating objects in maps, women are better at remembering landmarks in the position of objects. Men are better throwers; women are more dexterous. Men are better at solving mathematical word problems, women at mathematical calculation. Women are more sensitive to sounds and smells, have better depth perception, match shapes faster, and are much better at reading facial expressions and body language. Women are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material. " p 345

P 421 Pinker summarizes the arguments he made throughout the book. He writes that the blank slate, despite being an attractive vision, has a dark side.

"The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, child rearing, and the arts in the forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that can alleviate human suffering. It's corollary, the noble savage, invites contempt for the principles of democracy and of "a government of laws and not of men." It blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings. And in matters of policy it has elevated sappy dogmas above the search for workable solutions. The blank slate is not some ideal that we should all hope and pray is true. No, it is anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity, our inherent interests, and our individual preferences. Though it has pretensions of celebrating our potential, it does the opposite, because our potential comes from the combinatorial interplay of wonderfully complex faculties, not from the passive blankness of an empty tablet." P 421

P 354 Pinker argues that those who argue for an equality of outcome, or equity, derived from the assumption that males and females are exactly identical in every manner other than genitalia, are actually less respectful towards women. Accepting gender differences, and applying more sophisticated methods in order to expose workplace discrimination (other than the banal and illogical wage gap), takes a more respectful view of women and their choices.

"There is no doubt that women faced widespread discrimination in the past and continue to face it in some sectors today. This cannot be proven by showing the men earn more than women or that the sex ratio departs from 50-50, but it can be proven in other ways. Experimenters can send out fake resumes or grant proposals that are identical in all ways except the sex of the applicant and see whether they are treated differently. Economists can do a regression analysis and that takes measures of people's qualifications and interests and determines whether the men and the women earn different amounts, or are promoted at different rates, when their qualifications and interests are statistically held constant." P 354

P 267 Pinker quotes literary critic George Steiner's analysis of the Greek play Antigone, in which he explains its enduring resonance. He explains how it captures all the principal inter-relational conflicts of humankind. Pinker then emphasizes our desire for conflict and problem solving, our need to live dramas. Who knows why? What did our hunter-gatherer ancestors do to for us to have evolved such desires?

"These constants are fivefold; the confrontation of men and women; of age end of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of man and of God. The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable.... The bittersweet process of defining ourselves by our conflicts with others is not just a subject for literature but can illuminate the nature of our emotions and the contents of our consciousness. If a genie offered us the choice between belonging to a species that could achieve perfect egalitarianism and solidarity or belonging to a species like ours in which relationships with parents, siblings, and children are uniquely precious, it is not so clear that we would choose the former." P 267

P 296 Pinker gives a brief list of some of the advantages of democracy, saying it's the "worst form of government except all other forms that have been tried." He contrasts this with Marxism which he labels a "failed experiment", saying that the nations that adopted it either collapsed, gave it up, or languish in backward dictatorship. He says that the boundless ambition to remake human nature turns the "new boss" into tyrannical despots and mass murderers.

"They provide more comfort and freedom, more artistic and scientific vitality, longer and safer lives, and less disease and pollution than any of the alternatives. Modern democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with their boats." P 296

P 394 Interesting, Pinker sheds light on the fatherless ness social pathology. It is clear from everything we've gathered the strong association of fatherlessness and crime, drug usage, and venereal disease rates, but nonetheless, Pinker says this may be more precisely related to fatherlessness being the norm of the peer group.

"To be fair, concerns about fatherlessness may not be Ill founded , but the problem may be the absence of fathers from all the families in the neighborhood rather than the absence of a father from an individual family. These fatherless children lack access to other families in which an adult male is present, and worse, they have access to packs of single men, whose values trickle down to their own peer groups." P 394

P 278 Pinker says that the taboo on thinking about core values is not totally irrational. If life is pure cost-benefit analysis, if taboos don't matter and are purely unnecessary, then that would justify dissolving romantic relationships, familial love, even art and beauty. Something wouldn't be right....

"To determine whether someone is emotionally committed to a relationship, guaranteeing the veracity of his promises, one should ascertain how he thinks: whether he holds your interests sacred or constantly weighs them against the profits to be made by selling you out." P 278

P 318 Pinker says that morality did not simply accompany the Big Bant and pervade our universe like background radiation. It was discovered by our ancestors after billions of years of the morally indifferent process known as natural selection.

"To survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative), is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is some thing that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river and one important respect, it is inclined to hit back." P 318

P 347-348 This is very interesting— and explains very nicely the idea of "gender fluidity", the idea that ones gender varies by the hour. This is rather something found in all men, and does not imply that you belong to any third gender.

"Variation in the level of testosterone among different men, and in the same man in different seasons or at different times of day, correlates with libido, self-confidence, and the drive for dominance. Violent criminals have higher levels the nonviolent criminals; trial lawyers have higher levels than those who push paper. " p 347-348

P 399 Pinker summarizes his chapter on children. A social organism needs society. Peer group is the subsequent generation in its nascent form. Parents should understand that.

"We groan when children obsess over wearing the right kind of cargo pants, but we would be just as mortified if a very large person forced us to wear pink overalls to a corporate board meeting or polyester disco suit to an academic conference. "Being socialized by a peer group" is another way of saying "living successfully within a society," which for a social organism means "living." It is children, above all, who are alleged to be blank slates, and that can make us forget they are people." P 399

P 359 Pinker continues to cut into the reality of the "anti-female" rhetoric that dominates current feminist thought. It doesn't respect women's choices, because it doesn't acknowledge differences between men and women, and the refusal to acknowledge such differences is to reject women friendly policies such as parental leave, subsidized childcare, flexible hours, and stoppages of the tenure clock. Additionally, it pressures women into pursuing male typical fields in order close the gender gap. It denies women autonomy, it says that women should value the collective effort of closing the gap rather than pursuing what she desires as an individual. Ironically, a woman is told that she is oppressed, nearly enslaved by an omnipresent force called the patriarchy, it's existence supported by paltry evidence such as the wage gap, which until closed, signifies that a woman's priority is to work in fields not necessarily to her liking. That is oppressive rhetoric, since it denies women individual freedom to pursue what she wants.

"We should not be sending {gifted} women the messages that they are less worthy human beings, less valuable to our civilization, lazy or low in status, if they choose to be teachers rather than mathematicians, journalists rather than physicists, lawyers rather than engineers." These are not hypothetical worries: a recent survey by the national science foundation found that many more women than men say they majored in science, mathematics, or engineering under pressure from teachers or family members rather than to pursue their own aspirations - and that many eventually switched out for that reason." P 359

P 409 Pinker responds to critics who explained universal art as a result of the widespread influence and global bullying of the west. Pinker discusses how we are drawn to things that promoted the fitness of our ancestors such as the taste of food, the experience of sex, the presence of children, an abundant landscape.

"Western societies are good at providing things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and abundant food. Rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these goods and services not from benevolence but from self interest, namely the profits to be made by selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also perfected ways of giving people what they like - in this case, art forms that appeal to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Hollywood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the west, it may not be an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic. This all sounds very parochial and Eurocentric, and I wouldn't push it too far, but it must have an element of truth: If there is a profit to be made in appealing to global human taste, it would be surprising if entrepreneurs had not taken advantage of it. And it isn't as Eurocentric as one might think. Western culture, like western technology, Western cuisine, is voraciously eclectic, appropriating any trick to please its people from any culture at encounters. An example is one of America's most important cultural exports, popular music. Ragtime, jazz, rock, blues, soul, and rap grew out of African-American Musical forms, which originally incorporated African rhythms and vocal styles." P 409

P 283 Pinker introduces politics. Says that political temperaments do indeed revolve around a binary. Obviously (like all other binaries), no one is 100% in one category vs the other. Liberalism and conservatives represent two contrasting representations of the world.

"When identical twins who were separated at birth are tested in adulthood, their political attitudes turn out to be similar, with a correlation coefficient of .62 (on a scale from -1 to +1). Conservatives, for example, tend to be more authoritarian, conscientious, traditional, and rulebound. When it comes to attitudes that are heritable, people react more quickly and emotionally, are less likely to change their minds, and are more attracted to like-minded people." P 283

P 345. Pinker cutting straight into the meat on gender differences in parenting and relationships. Males typically engage in philandering for sexual novelty, the desire to try something new, while women typically engage in philandering because they have found a higher value mate. As far as jealousy, I'm not entirely sure how these differences manifest themselves.

"Women are more attentive to their infants everyday cries (though both sexes respond equally to cries of extreme distress), and are more solicitous toward their children in general. Girls play more at parenting and trying on social roles, boys more at fighting, chasing, and manipulating objects. And men and women differ in their patterns of sexual jealousy, their mate preferences and their incentives to philander." P 345

P 345 Pinker continues to go on his "gender difference rampage". Here are some more fascinating statistics representing probability/ population differences between the sexes. These differences are found on a worldwide scale.... the conditioning hypothesis is looking less credible.

"Women experience basic emotions more intensely, except perhaps anger. Women have more intimate social relationships, are more concerned about them, and feel more empathy towards their friends, though not toward strangers. (The common view that women are more empathetic toward everyone is both evolutionary unlikely and untrue. ) They maintain more eye contact, and smile and laugh far more often. Men are more likely to compete with one another for status using violence or occupational achievement, women are more likely to use derogation and other forms of verbal aggression." P 345

P 348 Pinker discusses women's changing proclivities and behavior depending on estrogen levels and menstrual cycle. Pretty fascinating that varying levels characteristically female hormone, estrogen, predict whether the female will get better at female typical tasks or male typical tasks. During the menstruales cycle, women are more selective about their dating partners, since their body reminds them that they can more easily become pregnant. I

"Women's cognitive strengths and weaknesses vary with the phase of their menstrual cycle. When estrogen levels are high, women get even better at tasks on which they typically do better than men, such as verbal fluency. With the levels are low, women get better at when on which men typically do better, such as mental rotation. A variety of sexual motives, including their taste in men vary with the menstrual cycle as well." P 348

P 412 Pinker criticizes modernism and postmodernism and says that art is indeed connected to the real world. It is clear that certain art is superior to other forms, that beauty exists. It seems a little bit deluded to think babies have already been socially brainwashed to be attracted to pretty faces and calendar landscapes.

"Young babies prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face then at a plain one. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play." P 412

P 362 To say that rape has nothing to do with sexual desire because violence is incurred upon the victim is to say that an armed robbery has nothing to do with greed. Pinker articulates perfectly why that is nonsense.

First obvious fact: men often want to have sex with women who don't want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one human being uses to affect the behavior of another: wooing, seducing, flattering, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: some men use violence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause. Men have been known to kidnap children for ransom (sometimes sending their parents an ear or finger to show they mean business), blind the victim of a mugging so the victim can't identify them in court, etc..... It would be an extraordinary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men didn't use violence to get sex." P 362

P 347 Pinker continues to demonstrate how ridiculous the "gender is a social construct" hypothesis appears. The process where the male testes secrete testosterone that does not occur with females. This explains why gays, those ostensibly feminine in many respects, still have the same inclination to wooing and promiscuity that is male typical.

The human body contains a mechanism that causes the brains of boys in the brains of girls to diverge during development. The Y chromosome triggers the growth of testes in a male fetus, which secrete androgens, the characteristically male hormones (including testosterone). Androgens have lasting effects on the brain during fetal development, in the months after birth, and during puberty, and they have transient effects at other times. Estrogen, the characteristically female sex hormones, also affect the brain throughout life. Receptors of the sex hormones are found in the hypothalamus, The hippocampus, and the amygdala in the limbic system of the brain, as well as in the cerebral cortex." P 347

P 271 Pinker introduces Haidt's 4 major families that make up our moral sense. All of these play perfectly into Triver's theory of reciprocal altruism.

The other condemning emotions — contempt, anger, and disgust — prompt one to punish cheaters. The other praising emotions — gratitude and an emotion that may be called elevation, moral awe, or being moved — prompt one to reward altruists. The other suffering emotions — sympathy, compassion, and empathy — prompt one to help a needy beneficiary. And the self-conscious emotions— guilt, shame, and embarrassment — prompt one to avoid cheating or to repair its effects.

P 94 Pinker posits that the most prominent examples of plasticity in the brain do not really exhibit anything miraculous but rather ordinary programmed functions.

" A brain area for an amputated or immobilized finger may be taken over by an adjacent finger, or a brain area for a stimulated finger expands its borders at the expense of a neighbor. The brains ability to reweigh its inputs is indeed remarkable, but the kind of information processing done by the taken-over-cortex has not fundamentally changed: the cortex is still processing information about the surface of the skin and the angles of the joints. and the representation of a digit or part of the visual field cannot grow indefinitely, no matter how much it is stimulated; the intrinsic wiring of the brain would prevent it." P 94

P 1 Pinker outlines the the original major theories derived from the Judeo-Christian religions, which set the premises of how we acted within society, and of what our life purpose was. The loss of religion leaves a void of structure and meaning, still battling to be filled to this day.

" humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals. Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by them. The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body dies. " p 1

P 6 Pinker defined the concept of the Noble Savage, which accompanies the blanks slate, that mankind is most gentle and peaceful in his non-structured, primitive state. This is another sacred scripture for the deconstructionists. This ideology was proposed by Rousseau.

" it captures the belief that humans in their natural state are selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed, anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization." P 6

P 142 The first quote is from Samuel Johnson, who writes of innate universal sapien qualities. The second quote says that we are all far more similar then different, and again, individual differences are far more disparate than group differences.

" we are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by anger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure. " Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, 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 then on any differences." P 142

P 49. Some genes don't have a very high demand depending on the environment, both the climate and cultural environment. Also, only about half of the variation in most psychological traits within a given environment correlates with the genes, according to behavioral geneticists.

"A human example comes from Woody Alan. Though his fame, fortune, and ability to attract beautiful women may depend on having jeans that enhance a sense of humor, in Stardust Memories he explains to an envious childhood friend that there is a crucial environmental factor as well: "we live in a society that puts a big value on jokes... If I had been an Apache Indian, those guys didn't need comedians, so I'd be out of work."" P 49

P 243 Pinker introduces reciprocal altruism, which is one of the key elements of innate sapien morality. We have evolved to be sympathetic and trusting given that we are naturally cooperative and seek to give in order to get. That naturally produces gratitude and loyalty, which evolved in us in order to prompt us to repay favors. Guilt and Shame evolved to prevent us from cheating. Anger and contempt evolved so that we righteously punish those who break the rules of reciprocity.

"Altruism can also evolve when organisms trade favors. One helps another by grooming, feeding, protecting, or backing him, and is helped in turn when the needs reverse. This is called reciprocal altruism, and it can evolve when the parties recognize each other, interact repeatedly, can confer a large benefit on others at small cost to themselves, keep a memory for favors offered or denied, and are impelled to reciprocate accordingly. Reciprocal altruism can evolve because cooperators do better than hermits or misanthropes. They enjoy the gains of treating their surpluses, pulling ticks out of one another's hair, saving each other from drowning or starvation, and babysitting each other's children. Reciprocators can also do better over the long run than the cheaters who take favors without returning back, because the reciprocators will come to recognize the cheaters and shun or punish them." P 243

P 188 Pinker describes reciprocity and cooperation as innate human universals. He says that evolution has indeed endowed us with a moral sense, and it's circle expands through reason (Grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people's pain).

"Children as young as a year and a half spontaneously give toys, proffer help, and try to comfort adults or other children who are visibly distressed. People in all cultures distinguish right from wrong, have a sense of fairness, help one another, impose rights and obligations, believe that wrongs should be re-dressed, and prescribe rape, murder, and some kinds of violence." P 188

P 67 Pinker quotes Sowell, who illuminates the amenable nature of cultures. Cultures exist to preserve human beings, they aren't sacred, but useful, and are necessary in continuing the survival and thriving of humankind.

"Cultures do not exist as simply static "differences" to be celebrated but compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done — better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves, as they cope and aspire amid the gritty realities of life." P 67

P 222 Pinker says that education is not natural, again, that doesn't mean it's bad. We aren't innately equipped to perform such tedious academic tasks. He says we have to use natural desires as incentives to further our education, such as pressure from family and society in order to obtain status. This gives us a motive to persevere. Education, like many other good things we do, isn't natural. It isn't a blank slate however.

"Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species wide knack for them to have evolved." P 222

P 181 Pinker quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes with respect to punishment in the absence of free will. He also sheds light on the confusion between explanation and exculpation. He states that explaining behavior is not to exonerate the behaver. Responsibility is practical in the sense that as long as it is permeated throughout society so that everyone prone to break the law is aware to some extent of the consequences, it is effective in deterring crimes.

"If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted), I should say, "I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you'd like. But the law must keep its promises." P 181

P 210 Pinker explains how language can indeed limit interpersonal communication, but it isn't a prison that restricts the thoughts and impressions that we're capable of generating. He explains how language is undergoing constant renovation.

"Rather, we engage in a constant give-and-take between the thoughts we try to convey in the means our language offers to convey them. We often grope for words, are dissatisfied with what we write because it does not express what we wanted to say, or discover when every combination of words seems wrong that we do not really know what we want to say. And when we get frustrated by a mismatch between our language and our thoughts, we don't give up, defeated and mum, but change the language. We can caught neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), Invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope). That is why every language, far from being an immutable penitentiary, is constantly under renovation." P 210

P 66 Cultures are porous and constantly in flux— they borrow whatever works best. There is an odd obsession with the desire to deconstruct a cultural practice that doesn't have any evolutionary or biological explanation, while ignoring the fact that there is an evolutionary need for humans to cooperate and thus a need for such a practice to exist. Undoing it would simply be beckoning for a replacement, which is frivolous and ultimately harmful in the inefficient use of focus and time. Some deconstructing is immediately harmful, like suddenly switching driving lanes.

"Some collective practices have a Normas inertia because they impose a high cost on the first individual who would try to change that. I switched from driving on the left are driving on the right could not begin with a daring non-conformist or a grassroots movement but would have to be imposed from the top down. Other examples are laying down your weapons when hostile neighbors are armed to the teeth, abandoning the QWERTY keyboard layout, and pointing out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes." P 66

P 189 Pinker questions the hypothesis that religion is necessary to provide us with a moral code; without it, we're completely vulnerable to despondency, aimlessness and nihilism. He says studying more thoroughly human traits of empathy, reciprocity, cooperation, will help us better towards morality than dogmatically following a fallible work of fiction. He argues that not only can it be a useful backer to use God to commit some loathsome and regressive acts, additionally, inserting the existence of a soul doesn't do anything but hamper science.

"The history of religion shows that God has commanded people to do all manner of selfish and cruel acts: massacre Midianites and abduct her women, stone prostitutes, execute homosexuals, burn witches, slay Heretics and infidels, throw protestants out of windows, withhold medicine from dying children, shoot up abortion clinics, hunt down Salman Rushdie, blow themselves up in marketplaces, and crash airplanes into skyscrapers. Recall that even Hitler thought he was carrying out the will of God." P 189

P 46 Just think about that, for such cognitive disorders, biological relatives are better predictors than adopted relatives. Let me repeat: biological relatives are better predictors than adopted relatives. Another note, biological siblings, whether raised together or apart, are far more similar than adoptive siblings. Pretty cogent argument that nature is very underrated in our manner of analyzing the development of humans.

" Autism, dyslexia, language delay, language impairment, learning disability, left-handedness, major depression, bipolar illness, obsessive compulsive disorder, sexual orientation, and many other conditions run in families, are far more concordant in identical than in fraternal twins, are better predicted by peoples biological relatives then by their adoptive relatives, and are poorly predicted by any measurable feature of the environment." P 46

P 172 Pinker relays some of the horrors committed against women in today's day and age, that aren't discussed in order to avoid taking on a "civilizing mission" or "white man/woman's burden." Instead, despite the endless empathy seemingly impregnated in the modern day feminist movement, it shifts its focal point away from such atrocities to trifles such as "toxic masculinity", "the wage gap", "male chauvinism", and other first world issues. What happened to being a "world citizen"?

" One of the most pressing feminist causes today is the condition of women in the developing world. In many places female fetuses are selectively aborted, newborn girls are killed, daughters are malnourished and kept from school, adolescent girls have their genitals cut out, young women are clothed from head to toe, adulteresses are stoned to death, and widows are expected to fall onto their husbands' funeral pyres. The relative us climate in many academic circles does not allow these whores to be criticized because their practices of other cultures..." p 172

P 139 Pinker lists the fears regarding free will, and the subconscious desire for many to protect so passionately the blank slate doctrine, and to attack viciously anything that contradicts it. He lists these fears before getting ready to smash them to smitherines.

" The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears: If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified. If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile. If people are products of biology, Freewill would be a myth and we would no longer hold people responsible for their actions. If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose." P 139

P 26 The superorganism, an idea that Albert Kroeber, student of Boas, layed out, a soul-like mystical entity that is disconnected from the biological and machine-like instinctive tendencies of the body. Since it is separate from biology, it must be studied through a different lense, namely, through the social sciences. The separation and disassociation of soul and body preclude any idea that human beings are limited to behavioral confines, but rather can be molded infinitely, making the idea of Utopia actually plausible.

" The doctrine of the super organism has had an impact on modern life that extends well beyond the writings of social scientists. It underlies the tendency to reify "society" as a moral agent that can be blamed for sins as if it were a person. It drives identity politics, in which civil rights and political perquisites are allocated to groups rather than to individuals." P 26

P 236 Pinker mentions how school curricula have barely changed since medieval times. He says practical education strategies are the best manner of curing the shortcoming of human intuition in a high tech world. He says that subjects formerly held in high regard may not be as practical as they once were. Especially in American education, there is a very conspicuous lack of economics, statistics, and anything related to coding.

" The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly changing our intuition, these trade-offs cannot responsibly be avoided." P 236

P 210 Pinker beckons the question, why do virtually all cognitive scientists and linguists believe that language is *not* a prisonhouse of thought? He gives two reasons, the first being because creatures without languages have been found to possess all fundamental categories of thought working away: objects, space, cause and effect, number, probability, agency (the initiation of behavior by q person or animal), and the function of tools. The second reason, which corresponds to the quote below, is because people don't base thoughts, knowledge, and memory on words, grammar, phrases, but on concepts, broad impressions. The quote below illustrates his points nicely.

" What did you read in the page before this one? I would like to think that you could give me a reasonable answer to that question. Now try to write down the exact words you read in those pages. Chances are you cannot recall a single sentence verbatim, probably not even a single phrase. What you remembered is the gist of those passages — their content, meaning,, or sense — not the language itself." P 210

P 44 Pinker continues to portray with lucid examples the consequences of our innate geometry. Differences in intelligence, scientific genius, sexual orientation, and impulsive violence are not entirely learned.

" according to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobe's are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence. A study of Albert Einstein's brain revealed that he had a large, unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which participate in spatial reasoning and intuitions about number. Gay men are likely to have smaller third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus, a nucleus known to have a role in sex differences. And convicted murderers and other violent, antisocial people are likely to have a smaller and less active prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs decision making and inhibits impulses." P 44

P 38-39 Pinker responds to Catherine Lutz who claimed that the Ifaluk people do not experience anger but rather "song", which is the exact same mental process as anger but manifested in a physically different manner. Culture determines what counts as anger, torture, humiliation, but the our innate biological experiences of these phenomenons remain consistent.

" if an emotion is defined by behavior, then emotions certainly do differ across cultures. The Ifaluk react emotionally to a woman working in the taro gardens while menstruating or to a man entering a birthing house, and we do not. We react emotionally to someone shouting a racial epithet or raising the middle finger, but as far as we know, the Ifaluk do not. But if an emotion is defined by mental mechanisms — what psychologists like Paul Eckman and Richard Lazarus called "affect programs" or "if then formulas" (note the computational vocabulary)- we and the Idalia are not so different at all. We might all be equipped with a program that response to an affront to our interests or dignity with an unpleasant burning feeling that motivates us to punish or two exact compensation. But what counts as an affront, whether we feel it is permissible to go lower in a particular setting, and what kinds of retribution we think we are entitled to, depend on our culture." P 38-39

P 32 Pinker explains the first idea from the cognitive revolution, that "the mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback." He explains that much of what humans do depends on culture, but HOW humans will act is very predictable from a scientific perspective. At least that is my interpretation thus far.

" mental life can be explained in terms of information, computation, and feedback. Beliefs and memories are collections of information — like facts in a database, but residing in patterns of activity and structure in the brain. Thinking and planning are systematic transformations of these patterns, like the operation of a computer program. Wanting and trying are feedback loops, like the principle behind a thermostat: they receive information about the discrepancy between a goal and the current state of the world, and then they execute operations that tend to reduce the difference. The mind is connected to the world by the sense organs, which transduce physical energy into data structures in the brain, and by motor programs, by which the brain controls the muscles." P 32

P 95 Pinker describes how it may be true that the cerebral mechanisms in the visual field function the same even after losing sight. He says this also applies to deaf people using the same mental processes to interpret sign languages as hearing people. He says that it is plausible that the cortical areas used by sign language users are specialized for *language* (words and rules), not for speech per se.

" previous research has established that blind people have mental images - perhaps even visual images - containing spatial information." "Laura Pettito and her colleagues found that deaf people use the superior gyrus of the temporal lobe (a region near the primary auditory cortex) to recognize the elements of signs in sign languages, just as hearing people use it to process speech sounds in spoken languages. They also found that the deaf use the lateral prefrontal cortex to retrieve signs from memory, just as hearing people use it to retrieve words from memory." P 95

P 5 Pinker explains the Blank Slate philosophy of John Locke, how social arrangements are futile, humans are equal and differ solely because of socialization, and are pure products of circumstance.

" since ideas are grounded in experience, which varies from person to person, differences of opinion arise not because one mind is equipped to grasp the truth and the other is defective, but because the two minds have had different histories." P 5

P 240 I like this definition of the mind, and the paradox surrounding it when it comes to understanding itself.

"*Mind*,noun. A mysterious form of matter are secreted by the brain. It's chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with." P 240

P 154 Pinker explains to us what happens when we disassociate ourselves from all studies/sciences/research that the Nazis abused. This is why it is ridiculous to discard, suppress, or delegitimize ideas simply because they bare vague resemblance to Nazism or other harmful ideology. If we follow that route, we discard a whole number of things that we find useful today. We would have to give up the study of genetics and evolution entirely simply because Hitler abused it.

"-The germ theory of disease: the Nazis repeatedly cited Pasteur and Koch to argue that the Jews were like an infectious bacillus that had to be eradicated to control a contagious disease. -Romanticism, environmentalism, and the love of nature: the Nazis amplified a romantic strain in German culture that believed the Volk were a people of destiny with a mystical bond to nature and the land. The Jews and other minorities, in contrast, took root in the degenerate cities. -Philology and linguistics: the concept of the Aryan race was based on a prehistoric tribe posited by linguists, the Indo European, who are thought to have spilled out of an ancient homeland thousands of years ago and to have conquered much of Europe and Asia. -Religious belief: though Hitler disliked Christianity, he was not in atheist, and was emboldened by the conviction that he was carrying out a divinely ordained plan." P 154

P 146 Pinker quotes Noam Chomsky. Using sameness and eradication of group differences as the grounds for social equality is a sinister path to take, inviting racism, discrimination, left-handedism, sexism, heightism, and other prejudices to occur once any differences between such groups are shown to occur. Chomsky says only in a racist society in which groups matter more than individuals would group differences be tantamount to justifying discrimination and mass prejudice. Pinker then insists that in order to lessen the impact of placing too much importance on race-wide or sex-wide differences, we must acquire more extensive testing of mental abilities, in order to be able to more precisely and thoroughly assess individuals, apart from whatever group they belong to.

"A correlation between race and IQ, where this is shown to exist, entails no social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions a possible correlation between height and IQ. Of what social importance is that? None of course, since our society does not suffer under discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the category "below 6 feet in height" or "above 6 feet in height" when we ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of the mean IQ of people of his high category. In a non-racist society, the category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean IQ of individuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of a particular individual, who is what he is." P 146

P 37-38 Pinker introduces the third idea of the cognitive revolution: "an infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind." He also notes how there is surprisingly little variation among languages around the world, aside from differences in ordering the heads (verbs and prepositions) and complements (nouns and noun phrases).

"A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an infinite range of behavior by the muscles." P 37 The common kinds of heads in complements can be ordered in 120 logically possible ways, but 95% of the worlds languages use one of two: either the English ordering or it's mirror image the Japanese order. A simple way to capture this uniformity is to say that all languages have the same grammar except for a parameter or switch that can be flipped to either the "head first" or "head last" setting." P 38

P 48 Scientists have begun to pinpoint some of the genes that can causes the differences of mine we observe among people. Amazing how the loss or absence of a single gene can make such q significant difference in the psychological traits of an individual. That being said, Pinker stresses that The majority of psychology traits are the product of the conjunctive effect of many genes.

"A single wayward nucleotide in a gene called FOXP2 causes a hereditary disorder in speech and language. A gene on the same chromosome, LIM-kinase1, produces a protein found in growing neurons that helps install the faculty of spatial cognition: when the gene is deleted, the person has normal intelligence but cannot assemble objects, arrange blocks, or copy shapes... If you have a longer than average version of the D4DR dopamine receptor gene, you are more likely to be a thrill seeker, the kind of person who jumps out of airplanes, clambers up frozen waterfalls, or has sex with strangers. If you have a shorter version of a stretch of DNA that inhibits the serotonin transporter gene on chromosome 17, you are more likely to be neurotic and anxious, the kind of person who can barely function at social gatherings for fear of offending someone or acting like a fool." P 48

P 198 Pinker outlined the humanities interpretation of the world. The attack on objective morality namely.

"According to the relativistic wisdom prevailing much of academia today, reality is socially constructed by the use of language, stereotypes, and media images. The idea that people have access to facts about the world is naive, say the proponents of social constructionism, science studies, cultural studies, critical theory, postmodernism, and deconstructionism." P 198

P 53 Pinker introduces Natural Selection to the topic of the Blank Slate. He defines Natural Selection as "the morally indifferent process in which the most effective replicators out produce the alternatives and come to prevail in a population." He describes, from a logical perspective, the necessity of these traits for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These ultimate causes of behavior have seeped into subsequent generations of human biology; in fact, biological framework of human that strongly influences our personality and behavior is the result of milennia of evolution. Society doesn't dictate such framework, there are logical evolutionary explanations as to why we've maintained such behavioral traits such as spotting fertility in women through her shape, an inclination towards violence when the most noble man couldn't have survived. A need to cooperate with other people using language, clothing, manners of walking, and other cultural signals.

"An eye for beauty, for example, locks onto faces that shows signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate. The emotions of sympathy, gratitude, guilt, and anger allow people to benefit from cooperation without being exploited by liars and cheats. A reputation for toughness and a thirst for revenge were the best defense against aggression in a world in which one could not call 91 one to Sam in the police. Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of your brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow spreading invention." P 53

P 56 Pinker mentions a couple examples of tribes formerly thought to be without violence and ignorant of malevolence turned out to be hogwash. In the competition of genes for representation in the next generation, noble guys often finish last. The fight for resources and survival of the species can be quite vicious. Nothing utopian about the primeval days of our species.

"As the anthropologist Derek Freeman later documented, Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night, a young man who cannot we were virgin may rape one to extort her into a loping, and the family of a cuckold husband may attack and kill the adulterer... The Kung San have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities. They learned as well that a group of the San had recently avenged the murder by sneaking into the killer's group and executing every man, woman, and child as they slept." P 56

P 23 Pinker discusses the ideas of Boas, exalted as the father of modern anthropology, who proposed that people differ because their cultures differ, that complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary. That limitations of language stem from a reduced number of daily needs which often stems from geographical limitations. Pinker juxtaposes Boas to his followers, who later set the framework for modern sociology. Albert Kroeber even argued that social behavior could not be explained by any properties of mind, that social behavior is caused by other social facts, not by the individual.

"Boas considered European civilization superior to tribal cultures, insisting only that all people were capable of achieving it. He did not deny that there might be a universal human nature, or that there might be differences among people with an ethnic group,. What mattered to him was the idea that all ethnic groups are endowed with the same basic mental abilities.... Boas's students insisted not just that differences among ethnic groups must be explained in terms of culture but that every aspect of human existence must be explained in terms of culture." P 23

P 100 Pinker accounts the The testing performed by neuroscientists Steven Anderson and Hannah and Antonio Damasio on 2 young adults who had sustained damage to their ventromedial and orbital pre-frontal cortex when they were young children. These are the parts of the brain that sit above the eyes and are important for empathy, social skills, and self management. Upon sustaining such damage, changes in personality are loudly pronounced. The brain isn't as "plastic" as many would like to believe.

"Both children recovered from their injuries and grew up with average IQ is in stable homes with normal siblings in college educated parents. If the brain were really homogenous and plastic, the healthy part should have been shaped by the normal social environment and taken over the functions of the damaged parts. But that is not what happened with either of the children. One, who had been run over by a car when she was 15 months old, grew into in intractable child who ignored punishment and lied compulsively. As a teenager she shoplifted, stole from her parents, failed to win friends, showed no empathy or remorse, and was dangerously uninterested in her own baby. The other patient was a young man who had lost similar parts of his brain to a tumor when he was three years old. He too grew up friendless, shiftless, thieving, and hotheaded. Along with their bad behavior, both had trouble thinking through simple moral problems, despite having IQs in the normal range." P 100

P 60 Pinker points out that culture isn't separated by human nature, but is an extension of it. The better one understands the innate qualities of humans, the better he can understand culture. Time, geography, and random world events cause cultures to differ. Culture doesn't exist without neural circuitry called learning— culture relies on it.

"Culture can be seen instead as a part of the human phenotype: the distinctive design that allows us to survive, prosper, and perpetuate or lineages. Humans are a knowledge using, cooperative species, and culture emerges naturally from that lifestyle. To preview: the phenomena we call "culture" arise as people pool and accumulate their discoveries, and as they institute conventions to coordinate their labors and adjudicate their conflicts." P 60

P 9 Pinker describes Descartes' "Ghost in the Machine" philosophy, another accompaniment to the blank slate doctrine— it supports the idea of a free will, the existence of a soul, an ego. Another beneficial idea, it seems to me, at least on the surface.

"Descartes thought that behavior, especially speech, was not caused by anything, but freely chosen. We observe that our consciousness, unlike our bodies and other physical objects, does not feel as if it is divisible into parts or laid out in space. He noted that we cannot doubt the existence of our minds — indeed, we cannot doubt that we are our minds, because the very act of thinking presupposes that our minds exist. But we can doubt the existence of our bodies, because we can imagine ourselves to be immaterial spirits who merely dream or hallucinate that we are incarnate." P 9

P 121 Pinker highlights the trend of intellectual radical scientists viciously attacking studies revolving around behavioral science— daycare, sexual behavior, childhood memories, the treatment of substance abuse. Treading in such dangerous waters will likely lead to vilification, harassment, loss of job, and sometimes physical assault. Their seems to be a strong impulse to preclude such conversations about innate behavior as a way of safeguarding the Blank Slate. Another note, simply because we find differences between groups, does that warrant starting a Holocaust of left-handers? The differences between *individuals* inside of a group is far far far greater than any differences between groups. Therefore, it is nearly always advantageous to collect individual information before turning to group statistics.

"Even a topic as innocuous as left-handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications, are victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties." P 121

P 42 Pinker begins discussing the second bridge between mind and matter: neuroscience. This is impressive, science continues to explain these we previously believed to only have divine supernatural explanations. It has reached the point where it can predict our mental activity based on physical signals. Just think about that.

"Every emotion and thought gives off physical signals, and the new technologies for detecting them are so accurate that they can literally read a persons mind and tell a cognitive neuroscientist whether the person is imagining face or a place." P 42

P 242 Pinker introduces nepotistic altruism— our natural proclivity to show favoritism towards those related to us. Scarily enough, studies show that step parents and adopted parents have significantly higher rates of abuse against their acquired children than do biological parents. This should not preclude adoption or step parenting from occurring. But back to altruism... people are always willing to sacrifice something for the benefit of those they know and love, as long as the benefit exceeds the cost they incur upon themselves.

"First, since relative share genes, any gene that inclines an organism toward helping a relative will increase the chance of survival of a copy of itself that sits inside that relative, even if the helper sacrifices its own fitness in the generous act. Such genes will, on average, come to predominate, as long as the cost to the helper is less than the benefit to the recipient discounted by their degree of relatedness. Familial love — the cherishing of children, siblings, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins - can evolve. This is called nepotistic altruism." P 242

P 163 Pinker addresses the naturalistic and moral fallacy, the first being the belief that whatever happens in nature is good, and the latter being that if a trait is moral, it must be found in nature. According to these fallacious ideas, nature is stipulated to have only virtuous traits. Pinker debunks these, and states that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution.

"George Williams, the revered evolutionarily biologist, describes the natural world as "grossly immoral." Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection "can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short sighted selfishness." On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarian; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities." P 163

P 19 A quote from the founder of Behavioriam, John B Watson, who issued a famous pronouncement regarding the blank slate. This reiterates sociology's belief that culture and conditioning are paramount to one's development, or an individuals end result. They are insurmountable impediments or advantages to the path of an individual. Talents do not exist.

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select Dash doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, locations, and race of his ancestors." P 19

P 241 Pinker introduces Robert Trivers to the discussion of The Many Roots of Our Suffering.

"He showed that a deceptively simple principle — follow the genes - can explain the logic of each of the major kinds of human relationships: how we feel toward our parents, our children, our siblings, our lovers, our friends, and ourselves. But Trivers knew that the theory did something else as well. It offered a scientific explanation for the tragedy of the human condition." P 241

P 109 Pinker responds to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who criticizes Hamilton's theory that humans will proliferate with relatives based on whether the cost is less than the benefit, which is determined by how closely related they are. Sahlins says this is impossible, since early humans didn't understand fractions.

"His objection is a textbook confusion of a proximate cause with an ultimate cause. It is like saying that people can't possibly see in depth, because most cultures haven't worked out the trigonometry that underlies stereoscopic vision." P 109

P 41 Soh issues the fifth idea of the cognitive revolution, "the mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts." For example, candid facial expressions appear to be the same everywhere, but people in some cultures learn to keep a poker face in polite company. These bodily systems fire up facial expressions, but a separate cultural system governs when they can be shown. The innate systems for learning remain the same, and the capacity for good and evil remain the same. Ways of expressing such behavior differs according to culture.

"Humans behave flexibly because they are programmed: their minds are packed with combinatorial software that can generate an unlimited set of thoughts and behavior. Behavior may vary across cultures, but the design of the mental programs that generate it need not vary." P 41

P 177 Pinker introduces free will. He says that a free will would be something separate from biology, floating in a different plane, unpredictable, responding to a different set of rules. I sense a fallacy in Pinker's reasoning here, but I'm having a tough time pinpointing it. Can't people have free will while still being deterred or motivated by the consequences or effects that arise from an action?

"If behavior were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn't hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, nor be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behavior. We could not help to reduce evil acts by enacting moral and legal codes, because a free agent, floating in a different plane from the arrows of cause-and-effect, would be unaffected by the codes.. " p 177

P 79 Pinker describes the application of neural networks in everyday life. He explains the process of inputting information and then computing it.

"If everything is connected to everything else, a network can soak up the correlations among features in a set of objects. For example, after exposure to descriptions of many birds it can predict that feathered singing things tend to fly or that feather flying things tend to sing or that singing flying things tend to have feathers. If a network has an input layer connected to an output layer, it can learn associations between ideas, such as that small soft flying things are animals but large metallic flying things are vehicles." P 79

P 152 This is an impartial quote, it doesn't attack far-rightism or far-leftism particularly, but rather pinpoints the problem of corralling and judging a group based on certain members being prosperous, or more privileged. If this is unearned, or earned only on the backs of those less fortunate (in other words: exploitation), then this can quickly lead to vengeance, or feelings of inchoate grievance and bitterness towards those who belong to more privileged group. This applies as much to Chauvinism as it does to identity politics. The commonality in the atrocities of the 20th century were the disparaging attitudes towards one group of people, as impediments to some sort of social progress, a plague, an infectious disease, calling to be extirpated from society.

"If people are assumed to start out identical but some end up wealthier than others, observers may conclude that the wealthier ones must be more rapacious. And as the diagnosis slides from talent to sin, the remedy can shift from redistribution to vengeance. Many atrocities of the 20th century were committed in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success is taken as evidence of their criminality. The kulaks ("Bourgeois peasants") were exterminated by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet union; teachers, former landlords, and "rich peasants" were humiliated, tortured, and murdered during the Chinese cultural revolution; city dwellers and literate professionals were worked to death or executed during the reign of the Khmer rouge in Cambodia. Educated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted regions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews almost everywhere, have been expelled from their homes or killed in Pogroms because their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters." P 152

P 57 Pinker provides a graph showing the rate male deaths caused by warfare in the U.S.A and Europe during the 20th century (the most violent century in modern history, including two world wars and the nuclear war), and in prominent indigenous societies in New Guinea and early America. The death rate in the USA as a result of warfare is a single digit blip in comparison to the actual majority of male deaths being warfare in certain peoples. It isn't necessary to paint a false picture of people as peaceable and ecologically conscious in order to condemn the great crimes against them, as if genocide were only wrong when the victims are nice guys.

"In 1978 the anthropologist Carol ember calculated that 90% of hunter gatherer societies are known to engage in warfare, and 64% wage war at least once every two years. Even the 90% figure may be an underestimate, because anthropologists often cannot study a tribe long enough to measure outbreaks that occur every decade or so (imagine an anthropologist studying the peaceful Europeans between 1918 and 1938). In 1972 another anthropologist WT Divale, investigated 99 groups of hunter gatherers from 37 cultures, and found that 68 were at war at the time, 20 had been at war 5 to 25 years before, and all the others reported warfare in the more distant past. Based on these and other ethnographic surveys, Donald Brown includes conflict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and make coalition allies violence as human universal." P 57

P 116-117 Pinker writes of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who performed a 30 year studied on the Yanomamö people of a the Amazon rainforest. These are some his findings. He was attacked bitterly, verbally flogged. Accused of introducing the Yanomamö to violence and infectious diseases, as well as colonizing and taking on "the white man's burden."

"In his box and papers on the Yanomamö, Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in a killing had more wives and offspring than those who had not...". 116 And surveys of rates of death by warfare in free state societies, Chafnon's estimates for the Yanomamö fall well within the range." P 117

P 207 Pinker discusses the double edge sword of stereotypes. On the one end, stereotypes can lead people to believe negative things about entire groups, which engineers discrimination, which in turn diminished opportunities for that group and ultimately allows the stereotype to become true. On the other hand, as Pinker mentions in this quote, many students are taught to view their experiences through the lens of how their group has oppressed other groups or how it has been victimized. Since this is now the most important factor of their lives, of their sense of self, even daily mundane interactions with other human beings can be distorted by thinking in terms of "what group category does this person belong to", even after having collected individual information.

"In many universities, for example, minority students are earmarked for special orientation sessions and encouraged to view their entire academic experience through the lens of their group and how it has been victimized. Implicitly pitting one group against another, such policies may cause each group to brew stereotypes about the other that are more pejorative than the ones they would develop in personal encounters." P 207

P 148 Pinker discusses when discrimination is justifiable. He states than moral and socially cooperative people tend to discriminate based on cost-benefit analysis. Here's a an example: Do the benefits of a racially diverse workplace outweigh the cost of discriminating against whites?

"In more realistic circumstances we have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the discrimination is justifiable. Denying driving and voting rights to young teenagers is a form of age discrimination that is unfair to responsible teens. But we are not willing to pay either the financial cost of developing a test for psychological maturity or the moral costs of classification errors, such as teens wrapping their cars around trees. Almost everyone is appalled by racial profiling — pulling over motorists for "driving while black." But after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the world trade center and the Pentagon, about half of Americans polled that they were not opposed to ethnic profiling— scrutinizing passengers for "flying while Arab."

P 35 Pinker lists the second idea of the cognitive revolution: "The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything." He postulates that intelligence and human actions don't simply play themselves out, but have to interact with complex scientific processes in order to occur. All of these actions that we observe with our own eyes occur AFTER and as a result of the scientific processes having already been executed.

"Intelligence is a form of information processing and needs complex machinery to carry it out. As we now know, computers don't understand speech or recognize text as they rolled off the assembly line; someone has to install the right software first. The same is likely to be true of the far more demanding performance of the human being. Cognitive modelers have found that mundane challenges like walking around furniture, understanding a sentence, recalling a fact, or guessing someone's intentions are formidable engineering problems that are at or beyond the frontiers of artificial intelligence. The suggestion that they can be solved by a lump of silly putty that is passively molded by something called "culture" just doesn't cut the mustard." P 35

P 164 Pinker highlights the positive elements of human nature that prevent us from being complete lechera, perverts, egoists given to instincts. Without the bottom claim, one could potentially make the argument that women could be socialized to accept rape.

"It is inherent to our value system that the interest of women should not be subordinated to those of men, that control over one's body is a fundamental right that trumps other peoples desires. So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men's sexuality. Note how this calculus requires a "deterministic" and "essentialist" claim about human nature: the women abhor being raped." P 164

P 54. Pinker continues to discuss the role of natural selection to counter the modern denial of human nature. He reiterates that we have inherited systems of learning, preferences, and natural behavior that were necessary for our ancestors to survive. Such traits that lead to the survival of thousands of years of subsequent generations of our ancestors, cannot simply be erased or treated as if they haven't been passed down to us. He differentiates proximate cause of behavior from ultimate cause of behavior, the former being the immediate, logical explanation, and the second being the underlying reason for the existence of the proximate cause.

"It means only that inherited systems for learning, thinking, and feeling have a design that would have led, on average, to enhance survival and reproduction in the environment in which our ancestors evolved... *Approximate cause* of behavior is the mechanism that pushes behavior buttons in real time such as the hunger and lust that impel people to eat and have sex. An *ultimate cause* is the adaptive rationale that led the proximate cause to evolve, such as the need for nutrition and reproduction that gave us the drives of hunger and lust. "Why did the person act as he did?" To take a simple example, ultimately people crave sex in order to reproduce (because the ultimate cause of sex is reproduction), but proximately they may do everything they can not to reproduce (because the proximate cause of sex is pleasure)." P 54

P 64 Pinker explains the motives behind coordinating cultural practices— in an effort to keep everybody on the same page to avoid catastrophe and absolute chaos. There needs to exist a shared understanding of such cultural practices, an ability to understand a public agreement. People need to agree on a number of axioms in order to maintain any culture. There is nothing inherently and mystically about social constructions, but there is an innate need for them.

"Many cultural practices are arbitrary in their specific form but not in their reason for being. There is no good reason for people to drive on the right side of the road as opposed to the left side, or vice versa, but there is every reason for people to drive on the same side. Other examples of arbitrary but coordinated choices, which economist call "cooperative equilibria," include money, designated days of rest, and the pairings of sound and meaning that make up the words in a language." P 64

P 89 Pinker clarifies that visual system is just one tiny spec of the primary sensory cortex, which itself is not even close to the entire brain.

"Many of the others underlie other functions such as language, reasoning, planning, and social skills. Though no one knows to what extent they are genetically prepared for their computational rolls, there are hints that the genetic influence is substantial." P 89

P 157 Pinker affirms that government sponsored mass murder can issue from anti-innatist beliefs just as easily as from an innatist one. He juxtaposes Marxism and Nazism, and outlines their commonalities. The third quote is absolutely crucial; in every society, there are in-groups and out-groups, defined by how well such people perform under the social standards and mores, whether or not they break taboos, etc. According to Pinker, it is pernicious to define a group as a complete anathema, whether that hostility be rooted in racism or not, the end result of ostracism, contempt, and vengeance towards one group are ugly.

"Nazism and Marxism share a desire to reshape humanity. "The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary," wrote Marx; "the will to create mankind a new" is the core of national Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policy.... Hitler and Marx share the belief that history is a pre-ordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the outgroup as less than human. It doesn't matter whether the groups are thought to be be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they could create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of the coin." P 157

P 144 This quote made me laugh. "The one drop tule for being 'black'". Haha Racial differences aren't an exact boundary, but because of climatic obstacles in the past, many groups were unable to assimilate and choose mates from random groups. For that reason, races are still largely discernible.

"Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are pure social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeonholes such as "colored," "Hispanic," "Asian/pacific islander," and the one drop rule for being "black," it is an overstatement when it comes to human differences in general."

P 225 Pinker giving examples that make us doubt the existence of a soul, something mystical and separate from our biological makeup. If cloning becomes possible, which seems to be very plausible, will it contain a soul? Will we discriminate against clones? It will have the same innate mechanisms as us, and will be indistinguishable. It too, will develop a false sense of self as well. Pinker also mentions that the ability to feel depends on a functioning nervous system. Also, we do extend compassion to humans who aren't capable of feeling. Last point, many kinds and degrees of existence lie between the living and the dead, and that will become even more true as medical technology improves. (Alzheimer's)

"Occasionally two fertilize eggs, which ordinarily would go on to become fraternal twins, merge into a single embryo that develops into a person who is a genetic chimera: some of her cells have one genome, others have another genome. Does her body house two souls? For that matter, if human cloning ever became possible (and there appears to be no technical obstacle), every cell in a persons body would have the special ability that is supposedly unique to a conceptus, namely developing into a human being. True, the genes in a cheek cell can become a person only with unnatural intervention, but that is just as true for an egg that is fertilized in Vitro. Yet no one would deny that children conceived by IVF have souls." P 225

P 120 These "radical scientists" insist with the invincible fallacy that human nature or genetic differences among human beings automatically mean that this warrants unequal treatment under the law— discrimination, segregation, even kickstarting a full-out patriarchy— thus such studies revealing genetic differences have to be shut down at all costs.

"Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality are factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that these scourges were not so bad after all." P 120

P 98 Pinker corrects the equivocal implications drawn from the brain's ability to reallocate cortical responsibilities. Not only does do certain cortexes perform better tasks than others, they also are organized genetically to take on new tasks if necessary. Nothing plastic, or inexplicable from a biological standpoint about reallocation of cortical tasks.

"One of the most commonly cited examples of plasticity in both humans and monkeys is that the cortex dedicated to an amputated or numbed body part may get reallocated to some other body part. But the fact that the input contains the brain once it is built does not mean that the input molded the brain in the first place. Most amputees experience phantom limbs: vivid, detailed hallucinations of the missing body parts. Amazingly, a substantial proportion of people who are born with a limb missing experience these apparitions as well. " P 98

P 98 Fascinating experiments performed with mice. Demonstrates (doesn't prove conclusively) that removing input (one's environment) may have less of negative effect than removing certain key gene. A relevant in the argument of nature vs nurture.

"One team invented a mouse whose synapses were completely shut down, preventing neurons from signaling to one another. It's a brain develop fairly normally, complete with layered structures, Piper pathways, and synapses in the right places... Another team designed a mouse with a useless thalamus, depriving the entire cortex of its input. But the cortex differentiated into the normal layers and regions, each with a different set of turned on genes. The third study did the opposite, inventing mice that were missing one of the genes that laid down gradients of molecules that help organize the brain by triggering other genes in particular places. The missing gene made a big difference: the boundaries among cortical areas were badly warped. The studies with knockout mice, then, suggests that genes may be more important than neural activity in organizing the cortex." P 98

P 167. An interesting quote from the philosopher Peter Singer, regarding morality. Pinker chronicles abhorrent elements of human nature that have essentially vanished and have converted into complete anathemas in today's society. The circle has recently been expanding to include many animals.

"People have steadily expanded the mental dotted line that embraces the entities considered worthy of moral considerations. The circle has been poked outward from the family and village to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and most recently (as in the Universal declaration of human rights), to all of humanity. It has been slackened from royalty, aristocracy, and property holders to all men. It has grown from including only men to including women, children, and newborns. It has crept outward to embrace criminals, prisoners of war, enemy civilians, dying, and the mentally handicapped." P 167

P 213 Pinker discusses the "Euphemism treadmill", which is the constant replacing of outdated words with fresher ones, that don't carry such negative connotations. He then relates this to the many intellectual circles, institutions, the public square, safe spaces, etc creating speech codes that ban the use of certain words (example: handicapped, illegitimate, invalid, man-made, New World, stepchild, to welsh, etc). He says this is futile, since this is a slippery slope, the replacing of old-outdated words doesn't cease. People associate words with concepts.

"People invent new words for emotionally charged referents, but soon euphemisms become tainted by association and a new word must be found, which soon requires its own connotation, and so on... The euphemisms treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are primary in people's minds. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name, at least not for long." P 213

P 51 Pinker discusses the genetic predisposition to be inclined toward such extreme personalities. He speaks specifically of psychopathy. Again, he isn't saying that biological predisposition is the uni-variable explanation for behavior and personality, but merely stating that it plays a more impactful role than many think. Almost all psychopaths, and other pathologically anti social people have some predisposition to behave in that manner, but having that predisposition isn't a guaranteeing determinant that one will necessarily manifest that behavior. Reverting back to biologically twin phenomenon, imagine discovering that he is eerily similar to you, that in fact you did not have as much soul, or discretion, as you may be lead to believe. That much of what you identify as yourself, was predicted by what occurred in the Fallopian tubes of your mother.

"People who commit truly heinous acts, such as bilking elderly people out of their life savings, raping a succession of women, or shooting convenient store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery, are often diagnosed with "psychopathy" or "antisocial personality disorder." Most psychopaths showed signs of malice from the time they were children. They bullied smaller children, tortured animals, lied habitually, and were incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal family backgrounds and the best efforts of their distraught parents. Most experts on psychopathy believe that it comes from a genetic predisposition, though in some cases it may come from early brain damage. In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society." P 51

P 42 To anyone who believes that mind and body are disconnected. Just the damage to one aspect of Gage's brain causes him to lose much of what made him himself. The "I", the self, the subject are all dependent nerves in the head operating correctly; more precisely, particular parts of the brain correspond to particular emotions and behavior. Perception, cognition, language, and emotion—- the self— are all rooted in the brain. The self too, is just another network of brain systems.

"Phineas Gage, a nineteenth century railroad worker, was using a yard long spike to tamp explosive powder into a hole in a rock when a spark ignited the powder and sent the spike into his cheekbone, through his brain, and out the top of his skull. Phineas survived with his perception, memory, language, and motor function intact. But in the famous understatement of a coworker, "Gage was no longer Gage." A piece of iron head literally turned him into a different person, from courteous, responsible, and ambitious to rude, unreliable, and shiftless. It did this by impaling his ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain above the eyes now known to be involved in reasoning about other people. Together with other areas of the pre-frontal lobe's and the limbic system (the seat of the emotions), it anticipates the consequences of one's actions and selects behavior consonant with one's goals." P 42

P 143 Pinker talks about physical differences between races, including some being better suited to particular climates, more or less immune to particular diseases, and even relatively more athletic.

"Racial differences are largely adaptations to climb. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race then between ethnic groups or races." P 143

P 62 Pinker talks about the essential neural processes that must be functioning normally in order for humans to cooperate and perpetuate society/culture. Autistic people, for example, cannot read people's minds. They don't properly understand intentions. They can't necessarily associate words with actions. They will repeat phrases or actions verbatim without understanding the underlying motives.

"Remind unequipped to discern other peoples beliefs and intentions, even if it can learn in other ways, is in capable of the kind of learning that perpetuates culture.... Together with robots and chimpanzees, people with autism remind us that cultural learning is possible only because neurologically normal people have innate equipment to accomplish it. " p 62

P 99 Pinker explains what happen when someone loses or sustains damage to a part of the cortex in *both* hemispheres. It isn't pretty. He argues that cortical regions are not interchangeable nor plastic, nor mere subjects of the input.

"Several decades ago, neurologists studied a boy who suffered a temporary loss of oxygen to the brain and lost both the standard language areas in the left hemisphere and their mirror images on the right. Though he was just 10 days old when he sustained damage, he grew into a child with permanent difficulties in speaking and understanding... The psychologist Farah and her collaborators recently reported the case of a 16-year-old boy who contracted meningitis when he was one day old and suffered damage to the visual cortex and to the bottom of the temporal lobes on both sides of his brain. When adults sustain such damage, they lose the ability to recognize faces and also have some trouble recognizing animals, though they often can recognize words, tools, furniture, and other shapes. The boy had exactly this syndrome. Though he grew up with normal verbal intelligence, he was utterly in capable of recognizing faces." P 99

P 68-69 Pinker explains how the most successful cultures of history in terms of prosperity and development have been a conjunction of different elements from a wide array of other cultures. There is no such thing as cultural robbery— that's to say, no people has any right over their cultural practices/traditions. There's no patent on them.

"The "culture" of any of the conquering nations of Europe, such as Britain, is in fact a greatest-hits collection of inventions assembled across thousands of miles and years. The collection is made up of cereal crops and alphabetic writing from the Middle East, gun powder and paper from China, domesticated horses from Ukraine, and many others. But the necessarily insular cultures of Australia, Africa, and the Americas had to make do with a few homegrown technologies, and as a result they were no match for their pluralist conquerors." P 68-69

P 214 Pinker contradicts the common view that images, like words, have insidious power over our consciousness, since after all, we are idiot blank slates. He says we aren't giving humans enough credit. He says there exists a reality separate from images, and we are able to decry images that are misleading. We can easily criticize a movie that shows slaves leading happy lives, or an ad showing a corrupt politician trying to seem benevolent and relatable. He says that stereotypes or media images don't play as large a role as we may think in how we make decisions regarding people of certain groups. He says we are not helplessly programmed with images. We can evaluate and interpret such images with what we actually know. I'm going to touch the subject of perception vs experience. Can one's perception ever be manipulated to the point where experience of the individual is actually altered? I'm sure if you rarely have experiences with people of certain groups, but simultaneously you're immersed obsessively in stereotypical and negative media images of them, that could certainly lead to an altered perception. Or if you're ideologically possessed, you'd certainly be willing to lie in order to forward the conviction you have about you're ideology.

"The "intelligent eye," as perceptual psychologists call it, does not just compute the shapes and motions of people before us. It also guesses their thoughts and intentions by noticing how they gaze at, approach, avoid, help, or hinder other objects and people. And these guesses are then measured against everything else we know about people - what we infer from gossip, from a person's words and deeds, and from Sherlock Holmes - style deductions." P 214

P 119 It appears zero innateness is the only acceptable belief (other than sex, excrement, eating, and a couple other paltry traits). All departures from it are complete determinism. This is an example of "the left pole", where everything else is to the right.

"The blank slate became a sacred doctrine that, in the minds of its defenders, had to be either avowed with the perfect faith or renounced in every aspect. Only such black and white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that *some* aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that *all* aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits *influence* human affairs into the idea that they *determine* human affairs." P 119

P 145 Pinker makes a crucial point that we do not revulsion toward discrimination, slavery, and bigotry based on everyone being identical plastic clones, but rather because we find it abhorrent for us to judge others based on the average traits of groups to which they belong, while ignoring the commonalities the we all share as Sapiens.

"The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs." "The author, Thomas Jefferson, made it clear that he was referring to an equality of rights, not a biological sameness. For example, in an 1813 letter to John Adams he wrote: "I agree with you that there's a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents... For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son." The fact that the declaration originally was applied only to white men, and that Jefferson was far from an egalitarian in the conduct of his own life, does not change the argument. Jefferson defended political equality among white men - a novel idea in his time — even as he acknowledged innate differences among white men." P 145

P 77 Pinker concluded that the number of genes in a genome has little to do with the complexity of an organism. What is more relevant in determining the complexity of an organism is the interdependency and the innumerable connections made among the genes. There are nearly endless (though def not infinite) combinations of gene interactions.

"The complexity of an organism thus depends not just on its gene count but on the intricacies of the box and arrow diagram that captures how each gene impinges on the activity of the other genes. And because adding a gene doesn't just add an ingredient but can multiply the number of ways that the genes can interact with one another, the complexity of organisms depends on The number of possible combinations of active and inactive genes in their genomes. The geneticist Jean Michael Claverie suggests that it might be estimated by the number two, active versus inactive, raised to the power of the number of genes. By that measure, the human genome is not twice as complex as a roundworm genome but 2^16,000th power times as complex."

P 75 Pinker postulates that it's hardly plausible to believe that human brains are play-dough waiting to be molded by anything. He says that in contrast, our brains are innately wired to adapt within a changing environment. The environment doesn't change the structure of the brain, according to Pinker, the brain is ready to survive a changing environment.

"The complexity of the brain cannot come from the environment alone, because the whole point of having a brain is to accomplish certain goals, and the environment has no idea what these goals are. A given environment can accommodate organisms that build dams, migrate by the stars, trill and Twitter to impress the females, scent-mark trees, write sonnets, and so on. To one species, a snatch of human speech is a warning to flee; to another, it is an interesting new sound to incorporate into its own vocal repertoire; to a third, it is grist for grammatical analysis. Information in the world doesn't tell you what to do with it." P 75

P 31 A summarization of the division between understanding life and understanding matter and energy. It is true, that often times before discovering the scientific explanation for a phenomenon, the scientific explanation is prefigured by an intuitive understanding of that phenomenon, based on experience.

"The division was built into each of the doctrines of the official theory: the Blank slate given by biology versus the contents inscribed by experience and culture, the nobility of the savage in the state of nature versus the corruption of social institutions, the machine following inescapable laws versus the ghost that is free to choose and to improve the human condition." P 31

P 141 Pinker states the natural fears of what sort of attitudes may arise as a result of the slate not being blank. Because if the slate wasn't blank, different babies could have different things Inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. Pinker also highlights the major flaw in this reasoning....

"The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against members of some of the groups. The second is social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life — their income, status, and crime rate, for example - come from their innate constitution, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics, if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, they would invite them to try and improve society by intervening biologically — by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children, by taking that decision out of their hands, or by killing them outright.... The problem is with this line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all." P 141

P 100 Pinker sums up his counters to the scientific defense of "the blank slate".

"The human genome may have a smaller number of genes than biologists had previously estimated, but that only shows that the number of genes in a genome has little to do with the complexity of the organism. Connectionist networks may explain some of the building blocks of cognition, but they are too under-powered to account for thought and language on their own; they must be innately engineered and assembled for the tasks. Neural plasticity is not a magical Protean power of the brain but a set of tools that help turn megabytes of genome into terabytes of brain, that makes sensory cortex Dovetail with its input, and that implement the process called learning." P 100

P 90 Pinker points out that it isn't the environment that shapes the organ, but rather the organ that is innately prepared to withstand and develop in the face of a changing environment.

"The mechanisms are not designed to allow variable environments to shape variable organs. They do the opposite: they ensure that despite variable environments, a constant organ develops, one that is capable of doing its job." P 90

P 96 Pinker says that the suggestion that the auditory cortex is inherently suited to analyze visual input is not far fetched. Animals with visual inputs induced in the auditory pathway use the same operations that normally occur in the auditory thalamus and Cortex. The environment isn't molding the brain, the brain is just unbelievably prepared for an infinite variety of tasks.

"The mind treats sound makers with different pitches as if they were objects at different locations, and it treats jumps in pitch like motions in space." P 96

P 39 Pinker continues to cut into what is culturally defined, and what is universal, innate, simply human. A dress doesn't signal femininity in all cultures, but in all cultures there are manners or signaling femininity. There are many other examples.

"The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior — marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them maybe universal and an eight. People may dress differently, but they may all strive to flaunt their status via their appearance. They may respect the rights of the members of the clan exclusively or they may extend that respect to everyone in their tribe, nation state, or species, but all divide the world into an in-group and an out-group. They may differ in which outcomes they attribute to the intentions of conscious beings, some allowing only that artifacts are deliberately crafted, others believing that illnesses come for magical spells cast by enemies, still others believing that the entire world was brought into being by a creator. But all of them explain certain events by invoking the existence of entities with minds that strive to bring out goals. The behaviorist got it backwards: it is the mind, not behavior, that is lawful." P 39

P 99 Pinker continues to combat the many myths or distorted interpretations regarding the brain's adaptability, or better put, agility. He states that the hemispheres are essentially symmetrical, each with an orientation towards specialized tasks, but each already capable of performing all tasks, but one hemisphere doesn't perform all tasks as efficiently as it would if accompanied by its brother.

"The most famous evidence for extreme plasticity in humans had been the ability of some children to grow up relatively normal even with an entire hemisphere surgically removed in infancy. But that may be a special case, which arises from the fact that the primate brain is fundamentally a symmetrical organ. Typically human asymmetries — language more on the left, spacial attention and some emotions more on the right — are superimposed on that mostly symmetrical design. It would not be surprising if the hemispheres were genetically programmed with pretty much the same abilities, together with small biases that lead each hemisphere to specialize in some talents while letting others wither. With one hemisphere gone, the remaining one has to put all its capabilities to full use." P 99

P 178. Pinker states that it isn't biological determinism but rather environmental determinism that has attempted to excuse such violent and loathsome crimes.

"The most risible pretexts for bad behavior in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores." P 178

P 202 "Pinker discusses stereotypes and their relation to social constructionism. He says that many writers and intellectuals haven't stopped with the denunciation of only a few categories of social construction, but have continued to expand their circle to include all categories as social constructions. Social constructions are defined as categories that aren't determined by the nature of things and therefore not inevitable. After exposing the social constructions , it's now time to away with them or radically transform them.

"The philosopher Ian Hacking provides a list of almost 40 categories that have recently been claimed to be "socially constructed." The prime examples are race, gender, masculinity, nature, facts, reality, and the past. But the list has been growing and now includes authorship, aids, brotherhood, choice, danger, dementia, illness, Indian forests, inequality, the Landsat satellite system, the medicalized immigrant, the nation state, quarks, school success, serial homicide, technological systems, white collar crime, women refugees, and Zulu nationalism." P 202

P 84 Pinker touched the theme of the brain's plasticity in its ability to reallocate certain parts formerly believed to be innately wired for one specific purpose. Many also use the brain's ability to reallocate responsibility as a metaphor for the brain being plastic in all sense of the word plastic.

"The reallocation of brain tissue to new tasks is especially dramatic when people lose the use of a sense or body part. Congenitally blind people use their visual cortex to read braille. Congenitally deaf people use part of their auditory cortex to process sign language. Amputees use the part of the cortex formerly serving the missing limb to represent other parts of their bodies." P 84

P 50. Pinker describes the connection between genes and personality traits. Humans are already predisposed to manifest a particular set of traits and personality. Like Pinker says, 40 to 50 % of personality variation in the population can be attributed to genes. That is significant. Not only do genes strongly impact one's future inclination towards a behavior or personality, but such behaviors and personalities (or traits) only belong to the 5 dimensions that Pinker lists. The mind seems to also have a biological set of traits waiting for the genes to affect.

"The slate cannot be blank if different genes can make it more or less smart, articulate, adventurous, shy, happy, conscientious, neurotic, open, introverted, giggly, spatially challenged, or likely to dip buttered toast in coffee..... Psychologist have discovered that our personalities differ in five major ways: we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected. Most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits in an unabridged dictionary can be tied to one of these five dimensions, including such sins and flaws as being aimless, careless, conforming, impatient, narrow, rude, self pitying, selfish, suspicious, uncooperative, and undependable. All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50% of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes. The unfortunate wretch who is introverted, neurotic, narrow, selfish, and undependable is probably that way in part because of his genes, and so, most likely, are the rest of us who have tendencies in any of those directions as compared with our fellows." P 50

P 6 Pinker summarizes how the Blank Slate philosophy has set the agenda for the social sciences and the humanities. Interestingly, the blank slate philosophy is truly admirable in many respects, it provides incentives to individuals to do what they want—that they are not confined to little boxes called instinct or biology. It also speaks against chauvinism and other forms of prejudices towards those simply born into unfortunate circumstances. It also posits that human beings are infinitely malleable, infinitely programmable.

"The social sciences have sought to explain all customs and social arrangements as a product of the socialization of children by the surrounding culture: a system of words, images, stereotypes, role models, and contingencies of reward and punishment. A long and growing list of concepts that would seem natural to the human way of thinking (emotion, kinship, the sexes, illness, nature, the world) are now said to have been "invented" or "socially constructed." The blank slate has also served as a sacred scripture for political and ethical beliefs. According to the doctrine, any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in there innate Constitution but from differences in their experiences. Change the experiences — by reforming parenting, education, the media, and social rewards - and you can change the person. Underachievement, poverty, and antisocial behavior can be ameliorated; indeed, it is irresponsible not to do so. And discrimination on the basis of purportedly inborn traits of a sex or ethnic group is simply irrational." P 6

P 125 Pinker responds to Gould's quote saying that "good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one", in saying that Sapiens in our nature are not a destructive or evil species. Pinker also states that we house evil and destructive motives, in constant conflict of its beneficent and constructive ones.

"The statistics making up this "essential truth" are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not "good and kind people," make up about 3 or 4% of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as "evil and destructive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance 10,000 find ones that we call it "evil."" P 125

P 101 Pinker mentions surveys demonstrating universals that stretch across all cultures or different time periods. He says the underlying explanations for our behavior reside in understating the traits necessary for our ancestors to survive in their native environment.

"The study of humans from an evolutionary perspective has shown that many psychological faculties (such as our hunger for fatty food, for social status, and for risky sexual liaisons), are better adapted to the evolution of the demands of our ancestral environment then to the actual demands of the current environment. Anthropological surveys have shown that hundreds of universals, pertaining to every aspect of experience, cut across the world's cultures." P 101

P 16 Pinker stresses that the Blank Slate doctrine originating from a revulsion towards genetic determinism, eugenics, and using biology to justify murdering millions of marginalized people such as Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. The Blank Slate Doctrine, in contrast, establishes a social order in "which innate and immutable forces of biology play no role in accounting for the behavior of social groups." It is an admirable goal at its outset, but it may spiral into the ideology of identity politics, rejection of responsibility, and egalitarianism. The idea that minds are shaped by culture does indeed provide a bulwark against racism and discrimination.

"The very idea that the members of an ethnic group should be persecuted because of their biology fills us with revulsion. These changes were cemented by the bitter lessons of lynchings, world wars, forced sterilization, and the holocaust, which showcased the grave implications of denigrating an ethnic group." P 16

P 131 Pinker quotes Irving Kristol, who intimates that we need fiction and differing truths to maintain the wellbeing of a society. Sometimes pure unbridled truth isn't good enough— this is an inveterate stance taken by conservatives promoters of religion. It invites us to discuss a deeper philosophical conversation. For now, it's something to chew on.

"There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work." P 131

P 144 Pinker quotes Sowell, who chronicles the IQ differences among ethnic groups (independent of race) as a historic norm. Pinker clarifies that he personally believes these aren't exactly comparable to African Americans in the United States, whose transition to mainstream cultural patterns and resulting reduction of IQ difference may take more time, given the long history of slavery/segregation and incompetent policies in order to reduce inequality.

"Thomas Sowell has documented that in most of the 20th century and throughout the world, ethnic differences in the IQ are the rule, not the exception. Members of minority groups who were out of the cultural mainstream commonly had average IQ's that fell below that of the majority, including immigrants to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the children of white mountaineers in the United States, children who grew up on canal boats in Britain, and Gaelic speaking children in the Hebrides. The differences were at least as large as the current black white gap but disappeared within a few generations." P 144

P 89 Pinker described the function of the other subcortical brain organs, and the consilience among scientists that they aren't as plastic as the primary sensory cortex. Additionally, Pinker says that most theories and proposals in evolutionary psychology are about drives like fear, sex, love, and aggression, which reside in subcortical circuitry. So neural plasticity in the primary sensory cortex wouldn't translate to such drives of human nature.

"Tucked beneath the cortex are other brain and organs that drive important parts of human nature. They include the hippocampus, which consolidates memory and supports mental maps, the amygdala, which colors experience with certain emotions, and the hypothalamus, which originates sexual desire and other appetites. Many neuroscientists, even when they are impressed by the plasticity of the cortex, acknowledge that subcortical structures are far less plastic." P 89

P 21 Pinker notes that for a long time psychology has failed to differentiate theories of behavior, because there are indeed many different branches of behavior, and among those branches there are more branches. He criticizes the broad sweeping theories made by psychology.

"Until recently, psychology ignored the content of beliefs and emotions and the possibility that the mind had evolved to treat biologically important categories in different ways. Theories of memory and reasoning didn't distinguish thoughts about people from thoughts about rocks or houses. Theories of emotion didn't distinguish fear from anger, jealousy, or love. Theories of social relations didn't distinguish among family, friends, enemies, and strangers. Indeed, the topics in psychology that most interest lay people - love, hate, work, play, food, sex, status, dominance, jealousy, friendship, religion, art — are almost completely absent from psychology textbooks." P 21

P 183 Pinker lists the qualifications of inflicting punishment— we don't punish those who were unaware that their acts would lead to harm. He also points out the dissonance of exempting certain people from crimes because they lack the necessary brain capacity while insisting that we punish people because of "free-will". Do people lacking in certain cognitive functions not have free will? Why does their seem to be a direct link between someone's individuality, sentience, personality, and whether or not her brain is functioning normally?

"We don't apply criminal punishment to the delirious, the insane, small children, animals, or inanimate objects, because we judge that they — and entities similar to them - lack the cognitive apparatus that could be informed of the policy and could inhibit behavior accordingly. We exempt these entities from responsibility not because they follow predictable laws of biology while everyone else follows mysterious not-laws of free will. We exempt them because, unlike most adults, they lack of functioning brain system that can respond to public contingencies of punishment." P 183

P 203 Pinker describes how we conceptualize, or how we form concepts revolving categories— based on a conjunct of prerequisites, we can then make more inferences from a collection of other characteristics (those which define the category, or thing).

"We perceive some traits of a new object, lease it in a mental category, and then for that it is likely to have the other trades typical of that category, once we cannot proceed. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. If it's a duck, it's likely to swim, fly, have a back off which water rolls, and contain meat that's tasty when wrapped in a pancake with scallions in poison sauce." P 203

P 185 Pinker highlights our double sided intuition, a two sided stick. Some people, perhaps with defective brain mechanisms, will only be deterred from a crime upon receiving 5 lashings instead of two.

"Why do people's intuitions go in opposite directions - both "if he has trouble controlling himself, he should be punished more leniently" and "if he has trouble controlling himself, he should be punished more severely"? It goes back to the deterrence paradox." P 185

P 34 In elaboration of the first idea of the cognitive revolution, that "The Mental World can be grounded in the physical world by concepts of information, computation, and feedback", Pinker mentions how that in 1997, an IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, who referred to the outcome as "the end of mankind." The computer continues to surpass mankind in areas we formerly thought to be exclusive to mankind, since computers aren't capable of creativity nor first person subjective experience. The line between scientific/mechanical explanations and cultural behavior begins to vanish.

"You might still object that chess is an artificial world with discreet moves and a clear winner, perfectly suited to the rule crunching of a computer. People, on the other hand, live in a messy world offering unlimited movies and nebulous goals... Recent artificial intelligence systems have written credible short stories, composed convincing Mozart like symphonies, drawn appealing pictures of people and landscapes, and conceived clever ideas for advertisements." P 34

P 55 Pinker says that so many core human traits are found in all cultures and all epochs of time. Such mental faculties cannot simply be a result of conditioning when they are ubiquitous, found in all cultures and in peoples who have no culture.

"hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operators, from romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every society ever documented. It's not that every universal behavior directly reflects a universal component of human nature - many arise from an interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal properties of the body, and universal properties of the world. Primatologists have shown that are hairy relatives are not like a lab rats waiting to be conditioned butter outfitted with many complex faculties that used to be considered uniquely human, including concepts, a special sense, Julius, jealousy, parental love, reciprocity, peacemaking, and differences between the sexes. With so many mental abilities appearing in all human cultures, and children before they have acquired culture, and in creatures that have little or no culture, the mind no longer looks like a formless lump pounded into shape by culture." P 55

P 193 Pinker sums up in a nutshell the arguments he has adduced thus far. He believes the scientific view sharpens our moral view and doesn't detract from our sense of purpose. Nature is not necessarily moral. Tolerance depends on differences not leading to discrimination, it doesn't only bloom when people are completely homogenous.

"—It is a bad idea to say that discrimination is wrong only because the traits of all people are indistinguishable.. — it is a bad idea to say that violence and exploitation are wrong only because people are not naturally inclined to them. — It is a bad idea to say that people are responsible for their actions only because the causes of those actions are mysterious. — And it is a bad idea to say that our motives are meaningful in a personal sense only because their inexplicable in a biological sense. " P 193