I mentioned this book a few days ago and quoted from it. Now I’ve finished it and will summarize and highlight. As I said earlier, I’ve had this book since it was published in 1997 (I have a first edition, first printing), and have dipped into and browsed through it from time to time, but until now have never sat down and read it all the way through.
This was Pinker’s second big popular book, after THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT in 1994. In a sense here he’s trying to cover all the major things the mind does, aside from language, already covered. And it’s one of the fundamental modern books about current ideas of the brain and mind and of human psychology.
(Norton, xii + 660pp, including 95pp notes, references, and index; October 1997)
Two impressions strike. First, there’s a lot of familiar material here, partly because I’ve seen similar topics in later books, but also because some of those topics were covered by E.O. Wilson, especially his 1978 book ON HUMAN NATURE (review). Both Wilson and Pinker draw heavily on genetic explanations for human behavior that go back to the 1960s, is why. Given that, it was interesting to find the occasional completely new idea, to me, in Pinker, and I’ll highlight those here.
