I partly credit Steven Pinker for my realization, around the middle of my time in college, that I wasn't a lefty. Suspicious of the assertion, popular in humanities courses, that the most important features of human life—gender, language, family, science, morality—were “social constructs” with no basis in the natural world, I downloaded a copy of Pinker's 2002 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The book argued that the idea of a blank slate—“that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves”—was first posited by “Enlightenment thinkers” including Locke, Rousseau, and Mill and still clung to by social reformers and academics as “the secular religion of modern intellectual life.” But it could no longer withstand empirical scrutiny. In fact, Pinker showed, many traits that define human nature, good and bad, are encoded in our brains before birth.
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