From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 10:28:16 MST
Steven Pinker's fat new book, on the rediscovery of a persistent and
universal human nature forged by our Darwinian history, is really superb. I
thought at first that it was just going to mooch through territory most list
members will be familiar with, if only from Pinker's earlier excellent
books--evolutionary and cognitive psychology, game theory, etc--but Pinker
manages to make some of the themes new while developing his amazingly
polymathic knowledge of these fields into a number of perhaps unexpected
policy recommendations (in the broadest sense). Libertarians might be
surprised by his account of the virtues of a state, and of a more
egalitarian income distribution; non-libertarians might learn something
unsettling (as I did) from his account of why he follows Chomsky in
linguistics but not in anarchist-communitarian politics. An extraordinarily
fertile book: highly recommended.
Damien Broderick
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