This is a great popular science book. Pinker is a lucid writer with a style that is always engaging. As far as the content, this is a fantastic synthesis of a large number of works within cognitive science, especially evolutionary and social psychology. He summarizes works by other authors very well — I found the “Hot Button” chapters especially effective in this. I wished he included a capsule primer on evolutionary psychology, from whose literature he cites throughout the book, as he did for behavioral genetics in the chapter on children.
I’m less enthusiastic about the parts of the book where Pinker tackles politics, philosophy and art. He really does hate Marxism, even going so far as to compare it with Nazism! While there might be an argument that belief in the Blank Slate undergirds Marxist philosophy and thus partially provided justification for totalitarian communist regimes---the choice quote from Mao of painting the “beautiful blank canvas” of humanity comes to mind here---he runs roughshod on subtleties here, and veers almost into caricature. The same criticisms apply to his discussion of “radical scientists,” his favored term of abuse for academics like Gould and Lewontin with whom he as political disagreements. While his criticisms of blending politics and science are spot on---“dialectical biology,” anyone?---the discussion is so one-sided, so focused on evisceration, that it makes one think that Pinker’s take isn’t the most charitable and unbiased one.
The chapter on Art was probably the weakest part of the book. For all his calls to a reconciliation between the two cultures, it betrays Pinker’s great arrogance that he thinks he can discount modernist and pomo art so glibly since, he argues, it relies on a faulty view of human nature. Sure, some of his criticisms---none of them new---are valid, but I find that deriding an artistic and literary movement using evolutionary psychology is exactly the kind of thing that makes humanities professors suspicious of scientists who claim they aren’t trying to start a turf war. (And it’s sweet irony that he uses Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeson” as one of the overtures in the “Voices of the Species” chapter when Vonnegut’s work is squarely in the pomo tradition that he dislikes.) His psychologizing of people in modern art circles is partly true, probably---the race to shock the public by certain artists is a race for status, as is the performative impulse within certain circles of the academy to write impenetrably to signal depth of thought---but again, he fails to take seriously what he is criticizing.