Nature versus Nurture: the state of play
The Blank Slate, more readily recognised in its original Latin as tabula rasa, is the soubriquet for the view that in the eternal Nature-Nurture debate the scales tip heavily in favour of the environment: when it comes to the human mind, nothing is left to the caprice of genes. Steven Pinker, well known for The Language Instinct and to a lesser extent How the Mind Works, devotes some 500 pages to refuting this stance. Effectively, then, this book is all about human nature - its validation, characterisation, and neurological basis, along with all its wider moral, political and social baggage.