Science Quote by Steven Pinker

A polite grenade lobbed into the long-running romance between the mind and the blank slate. Pinker’s line is doing more than summarizing a research trend; it’s repositioning the terms of debate. By insisting that “many properties” of the brain are “genetically organized,” he’s trying to move human nature back onto the table as a legitimate object of study, not a political embarrassment. The phrasing matters: “newest research” is an appeal to scientific momentum, a way of framing the claim as an update you’d accept in any other field, rather than a worldview you can veto.

The subtext is a warning about how easily ideology can colonize neuroscience. “Don’t depend on information coming in from the senses” isn’t a rejection of learning; it’s a rejection of the extreme empiricist story that the brain is basically software waiting for data. Pinker is arguing for built-in structure: neural expectations, predispositions, and constraints that shape what learning even looks like. In cultural terms, it’s a pushback against the comforting idea that environment can be tweaked to produce any outcome, and against academic habits that treat biology as destiny only when it’s convenient to ignore it.

Contextually, this sits in the late-20th/early-21st century resurgence of cognitive science and behavioral genetics, after decades when “innateness” was rhetorically linked to reactionary politics. Pinker’s intent is to separate the empirical claim (some architecture is innate) from the moral panic (therefore inequality is justified), while also making clear that denying biology isn’t progress; it’s a different kind of superstition.