Science Quote by Steven Pinker

Pinker opens with a trapdoor: “great appeal” sounds generous until the sentence snaps shut on “zero equals zero.” It’s a scientist’s wisecrack dressed as an equation, and the joke does real argumentative work. Blank-slate thinking, he implies, seduces not because it’s well-evidenced but because it’s frictionless. If the mind begins at zero, then every difference we see in adults can be assigned to culture, parenting, schooling, media, policy - the whole human environment. No messy remainder, no stubborn variance that won’t yield to reform. The arithmetic is comforting: start with nothing, end with whatever you can explain.

The subtext is a critique of a moral and political aesthetic. “Zero equals zero” isn’t just about intellectual laziness; it’s about the psychological relief of a world where no one is naturally advantaged, disadvantaged, violent, gifted, or predisposed. In that world, inequality reads as purely man-made and therefore fully fixable. Pinker is needling the way a metaphysical claim (“the mind is a blank slate”) becomes a cultural permission slip: it flatters our sense of control and our appetite for clean blame.

Context matters because Pinker has spent decades arguing, against certain strains of social science and humanities orthodoxy, that human nature includes evolved, heritable structure - not destiny, but constraints. The line is compact rhetoric for a larger point: theories that promise total malleability often win not on data, but on the elegance of their moral bookkeeping.