Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a book, ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,'' he seeks to create greater political elbow room for those engaged in the study of the ways genes shape human behavior. ''If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs,'' he writes. A principal theme of Dr. Pinker's argument is that the blank slaters -- the critics of sociobiology and their many adherents in the social sciences -- have sought to base the political ideals of equal rights and equal opportunity on a false biological premise: that all human minds are equal because they are equally blank, equally free of innate, genetically shaped, abilities and behaviors. The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues. Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one. Moreover, the blank slate doctrine has political consequences that have been far from benign, in Dr. Pinker's view. It encourages totalitarian regimes to excesses of social engineering. It perverts education and child-rearing, loading unmerited guilt on parents for their children's failures. In his book he reproaches those who in his view have politicized the study of human nature from both the left and ...



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