The Blank Slate
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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The Blank Slate
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Narrated by:
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Victor Bevine
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By:
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Steven Pinker
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
Recently many people have assumed that we are blank slates shaped by our environment. But this denies the heart of our being: human nature.
Violence is not just a product of society; male and female minds are different; the genes we give our children shape them more than our parenting practices. To acknowledge our innate abilities, Pinker shows, is not to condone inequality but to understand the very foundations of humanity.
©2003 Steven Pinker (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"A passionate defence of the enduring power of human nature...both life-affirming and deeply satisfying." (Daily Telegraph)
"Brilliant...enjoyable, informative, clear, humane." (New Scientist)
"Startling.... This is a breath of air for a topic that has been politicized for too long." (Economist)
What listeners say about The Blank Slate
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mr P R Belugou
- 18-06-24
Read it and learn
It blew my mind rewrote my internal facts makes me think I’ll be reading more of Steven Pinker
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- R
- 10-12-19
Pinker’s best work
A total joy to read or listen to. Mr Pinker has great style and a wonderful mind. Admire them while you can. All his books should leave you in awe of his wit, wisdom and, again, great style (see another of his books - The Sense of Style).
I know he puts huge time and energy into his writings but the result is a lovely flow of difficult concepts made easier. My favour author. The narration is good too. The Blank Slate convinces us that we are born with different possibilities and that this should be understood and accepted. Some with aggressive, political ideologies might wish it were otherwise. A very important book
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Jan Andrew Bloxham
- 22-03-23
Ambitious, brilliant, convingcing
Perhaps not perfect, but the sheer scope would be impossible for anyone to nail everything about.
A must read imho.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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- Przemyslaw
- 24-01-23
Some chapters could be completely skipped
I skipped some chapters, because they bored me / they were too political. There're a lot of interesting ideas here, but in a lot of places it seems more argumentive than based on pure science.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Amazon Customer
- 21-01-20
The beautiful death of free will
God where to start? This book addresses everything you can imagine. Art, human nature politics, sexes and children.
It is beautifully written and marvelously narrated. Anyone who is interested in human nature (in a scientific and non-scientific way) and how it shapes us must read this. No scrap that!!
EVERYONE MUST READ THIS OR A BOOK LIKE THIS!
This book address the arguments of free will, noble savage and blank state from a political and scientific view. Honestly, genetics is not my field so I could easily be fooled by anything stated here, but the authors states certain studies (abstractly) which i honestly believe can be searched and verified by anyone who has the time.
If anything, most of his arguments are argued with common sense so even a fool like me could try to find a flaw in them. This book offers a "new" (hardly new, but we live in a society...) way of looking at human nature, which hopefully could help us shape a better future by understanding ourselves.
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20 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Marie Čechová
- 10-11-19
Important, fascinating, argumentative, kind.
I'm on a reading roll!! I love how this book flows. Every chapter worth reading. Definitely will come back to it very soon. Also it shows just how much Pinker loves language when he draws attention to its properties any chance he gets. And then he also quotes Shakespeare and Orwell a couple of times. I can't even. Oh and he drags his fellow academics just enough in this one, it makes it entertaining but kind.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Jas Singh
- 23-10-21
Foundational book
Much like Sapiens, The Blind Watch maker, History of time this is a foundational book which every should read
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Jan Skerswetat
- 12-02-20
A masterpiece of pop science writing
The best pop science book I have read so far. Pinker’s data driven approach embedded in rational and human-centred focus of the nature-nurture debate is refreshing. The writing style is skill full but yet not overly self-celebrating. The narrator did a good job. 20 hours of listening without losing interest, actually the opposite! I went back to chapters because I did not wanted to miss any detail. 5/5 ⭐️
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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- Anonymous User
- 22-07-22
Highly recommend - maybe better as a book.
Overall the book is great, have recommended and gifted it several times.
Thought provoking and interesting - but maybe better as a book read as it’s easier to pause.
Narration was a bit mixed, some times too monotonous on an already hard/long listen and sometimes a bit over dramatic.
All in all still a favourite of mine.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Yassin Musa
- 21-10-20
Unexpectedly fascinating
This book officially deepened my fascinations for social science and psychology in general I'll again.
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