The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker 

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The main goals of this book are:

• To refute the “standard social science model” that human behavior is 100% explained by socialization and there is no such thing as human nature.

As is usually our attitude toward the smarty-pants stance, we generally agree with the factual claims, but not the attitude. It seems this “standard model” is in fact a straw man that hardly anyone believes. I also found myself agreeing somewhat with many of the quotes from social scientists about the autonomy of culture from biology, which he seemed to feel were patently ridiculous. The idea that cultural evolution proceeds with considerable autonomy and can pursue its own its own goals (possibly to the detriment of what one would reasonably consider to be the individual's interest) is compatible with the idea that there is a genetically determined human nature. More bashing of s_j_gould.

• To argue that it is a mistake to believe that, (if it were only true) the blank slate would lead to morally superior outcomes in terms of avoiding prejudice, resurgent Nazism, etc.

It is a nice debating point w.r.t. the Nazism smear of evolutionary psychology, etc., that it seems that considerably more people were killed in the genocides in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia, than were killed by Hitler, and these countries had an ideology of the malleability (and perfectibility though coercion) of human nature.