![]() ![]() Through historical shortsightedness, we’re prone to underestimate just how pervasive routine violence was in previous eras. But rather than claiming that some homicidal imperative is hard-wired into us as organisms, Pinker maintains that we’ve grown less bloodthirsty over the course of recorded history. ![]() After all, the 20th century obliged us to invent new terms such as “genocide” and “concentration camp”-while this one has been plenty bloody so far. The very claim that violence has declined seems counterintuitive. ![]() So it proves mildly surprising to consider the subtitle of Pinker’s new book. Thus human nature, while somewhat flexible, is, for the most part, fixed. Our capabilities as a species (for example, language) as well as our all too obvious limitations (say, the penchant for aggression) have eons of momentum behind them. We have about two dozen basic cognitive and emotional systems operating between our ears. Pinker’s thesis is that the human condition is, in effect, coded into the human genome. Every few years, Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, publishes a doorstop-sized, improbably readable tome that swiftly generates controversy. In the perennial debate over nature versus nurture, Steven Pinker has established himself as the pre-eminent contemporary spokesman for biology as destiny. ![]()
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