The Blank Slate
by Steven Pinker
Allen Lane £25, pp509

Here is an intriguing question. Who wrote the following words? 'A child's mind is a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.'

Sounds familiar? John Locke or Jean Jacques Rousseau perhaps? Or someone more sinister: Karl Marx, Mao Tse-Tung or the writer of a Jesuit tract? All good guesses, but wrong, for the writer is Walt Disney, creepily revealing the secret of his empire's enduring success. Give children a good dose of Pocahontas and Goofy and you will have them for life, it would seem.

The quotation, provided by Steven Pinker, is apt, for it reveals how pervasive is the belief that the newborn's mind is an inert lump of tissue, a white sheet on which society writes what it wishes. 'Give me a dozen healthy infants, take one at random, and I'll guarantee to train him to become a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, or even a beggar-man and thief,' claimed the behavioural psychologist BF Skinner. And if Walt Disney agreed, who would argue?

Well, Pinker would, for a start. The notion of the tabula rasa, 'the blank slate', is utterly wrong, he insists. Human nature is not 'unbelievably malleable', as anthropologist Margaret Mead once claimed, but contains a set of inherited neurological instructions that direct us to seek status, to fight and to make peace, to make weapons and tools, to acquire a spoken language, to gossip, to use common facial expressions, to admire generosity, to adorn our bodies and to worry about the weather.

These, and many more 'human universals', are shared by people ranging from Australian aborigines to the good folks of Tunbridge Wells, and from the Amazon's Yanomamo people to the denizens of the Bronx, and they make a mockery of the idea we are products of our culture.

They show that the opposite is true. Our 'tribal and biological imperatives' have led us to create highly similar societies across the globe. Our instincts 'cut across cultures'.

And, certainly, it is hard to deny that Pinker, director of MIT's centre of cognitive neuroscience, is not on to a good thing. Evolution may have endowed us with great plasticity of thought, but it is ridiculous to expect that our recent emergence from the trees would leave us devoid of any hard-wired instructions for dealing with life.

'The mind was forged in Darwinian competition and an inert medium would have been outperformed by rivals outfitted with high technology - with acute perceptual systems, savvy problem-solvers, cunning strategists and sensitive feedback circuits,' he writes. 'A malleable mind would quickly be selected out.'

It sounds convincing, although there is more on Pinker's mind than mere intellectual debate. Our denial of human nature, and our continuing, unconscious adherence to the notion of the blank slate, is actually harmful, he insists.

Indeed, it is highly dangerous, for it 'perverts education, child-rearing and the arts', 'torments mothers who work outside the home', and 'blinds us to our cognitive and moral shortcomings'. It is a corrupting dogma, 'an anti-life, anti-human theoretical abstraction that denies our common humanity'.

You get the message. Were it not for all those Marxists, teachers, social workers, arch feminists, planners of council estates and all the other shapers of society who think they can change or control inert, malleable human minds, we would not suppress gifted children at school; overwhelm parents with advice on how to raise the perfect child; stuff people into soulless multistorey 'cement boxes'; or justify the release of murderous psychopaths in the deluded belief that evil is a product of society.

Nor would mankind have embarked on some of recent history's greatest atrocities, the famines of Stalin and the purges of Pol Pot, had it not been for 'the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering'. Such ideas might work with insects, but not human beings. Or as EO Wilson, the distinguished Harvard naturalist and ant expert, said of Marxism: 'Wonderful idea. Wrong species.'

It is breathtaking, rabid stuff. In particular, Pinker's monstering of Marxists and feminists is likely to reduce most university common-rooms to states of gibbering apoplexy. So be it, Pinker will doubtless respond: my only concern is to tell the truth about human nature. The question is: does he actually land any telling punches in the process?

Well, not as many as he thinks. Pinker may be a fluent, witty writer; his first book, The Language Instinct, was a compelling advocacy for the existence of mankind's basic, inherited drives. However, the power of his prose cannot hide this book's inconsistencies and weaknesses.

Stalin didn't inflict his misery because he believed in the blank slate; he did it because he was tyrant who merely grabbed the first doctrine that came his way, just as Hitler misappropriated the ideas of Darwin.

And just because teachers try to improve the minds of their pupils, that does not make them a bunch of sinister mindbenders. They just could not do their jobs if they did not believe they could influence fledgling minds, albeit it in only a very marginal manner.

Nor does it help that Pinker takes the most extreme, man-hating version of feminism and then represents it as the norm in order to show how the cause fails to explain intrinsic neurological differences between the sexes.

Equally, his snatching at studies that are supposed to support his thesis, without any accompanying explanation or elucidation, is extraordinarily irritating. 'A variety of sexual motives, including taste in men, vary with the menstrual cycle,' we are told without any supporting data. Similarly, we are told that 'in a sample of [mathematically] talented students, boys outnumbered girls by 13 to one' and that women 'maintain more eye-contact, and smile and laugh more often.'

All these ideas, and countless others, are extracted like scientific plums which are then squashed across the pages of The Blank Slate in an almost random and decidedly unattractive manner.

It also becomes painfully clear that Pinker's success and popularity have made him highly sensitive to attacks from those who still believe 'man has history but no nature', for he spends inordinate space in trying to take revenge on his principal persecutors: Richard Lewontin, the late Stephen Jay Gould and British neurologist Steven Rose. 'They deny human nature and deny that they deny it,' claims Pinker.

In particular, Gould is derided for being a goody-two-shoes who exploited his popularity to make unfair attacks on biological determinists; Lewontin is dismissed as a cranky Marxist; while Rose is accused of writing 'sneering' reviews - 'a fixture of British journalism' - about every new book on human evolution. To judge from The Blank Slate, the last of these have clearly hit their target.

In short, The Blank Slate looks a bit ragged, though ultimately Pinker is probably closer to the truth than his opponents realise. We do need to understand our complex, innate natures. Rhetoric - from opponents - will not make those basic components of our personalities disappear. However, we need that awareness not to give free rein to our innate propensities but to allow us to learn how best to control their worst excesses. It is not OK to rape because cavemen did it, but understanding these ancient urges might help us control such crimes today.

And that is mankind's dilemma. Our minds were forged in an era of ice ages, mastedons, and hostile tribes, but now have to deal with the twenty-first century. Until we learn how to reconcile our prehistoric habits with the needs of the modern world, our hopes of global peace look forlorn, as the Iraq crisis, the slaughters in Palestine and the tensions of Zimbabwe demonstrate.

Pinker is, therefore, right to tackle the subject. However, by vilifying opponents, and sneering at half the academic world, he will worsen, not improve matters. As Katherine Hepburn said in The African Queen: 'Nature, Mr Allnut, is what are put in this world to rise above.'