The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker Viciously Nitpicked by Me. Part Two.
Everyone should read the Blank Slate. I’m reading it for the third time, which is why I able to find a few errors in this awesome book.
The following is a minor error of omission. On page 229 of the Blank Slate it says:
“On the contrary: they did go out of their way to deter us from eating them, by evolving irritants, toxins, and bitter-tasting compounds” is a great bit of writing, but Pinker should have included antinutrients in the list. As Wikipedia explains, an antinutrient is a chemical that prevents your guts from absorbing on or more nutrients properly. If a plant “knows” that animals eat it to get a particular nutrient, it can evolve an antinutrient that removes the incentive by making it as if the plant didn’t have that nutrient.
On page 230–231 it says:
“Children falsely believe that a child of English-speaking parents will speak English even if brought up in a French-speaking family, and that boys will have short hair and girls will wear dresses even if they are brought up with no member of their sex from which they can learn those habits.”
1. That should be “from whom” not “from which”.
2. A child of English-speaking parents actually will speak English even if brought up in French-speaking family, a) if that family also speaks English, or b) the child speaks to his or her biological parents once in a while, e.g. over the telephone every day, or c) knows that he or she has English parents and therefore makes an effort learn English from books and tapes.
3. Children can learn what clothes their sex tends to wear from members of the opposite sex.
“They think similarlooking (sic) objects have similar powers […]”
- “similarlooking” should be “similar looking” or “similar-looking”.
- What are the similar looking objects referred to? If they are a penis and a rhino horn, they are in fact not merely similar looking but similarly shaped and with a similar function, i.e. penetration, and in a sense, do actually have at least one power in common.
On page 230 it says:
- “should not feel too smug” is weak because too much of anything is by definition bad. “Need not feel smug” would be better.
- Only those educated Westerners that fall into the categories subsequently described in the rest of the paragraph need not feel smug.
- Unwillingness to touch something does not indicate voodoolike intuitions.
- Strictly speaking, intuitions cannot be voodoolike. Voodoo is a method, isn’t it?
- All the examples related to Rozin in the paragraph are about Americans, and yet Pinker generalizes about educated Westerners.
- Even a sterilized cockroach can make your hand stink if you touch it.
- Touching a plastic cockroach may be seen as demeaning, like sucking a plastic dildo.
- The amount of time that the roach touches the juice is irrelevant. This is absurd. Perhaps there is a humorous allusion to the famous five second rule here, but I doubt it.
- “even Ivy League students”, as if they are such stellar representatives of “educated Westerners”. They are still callow. Maybe Pinker is biassed because he is a professor at Harvard University?
- We actually are, in part, what we eat. We also are what we drink and breathe. That’s why you shouldn’t eat food with lead in it, or breath air with lead in it. If you eat food with certain isotopes in it, you will become made of those of isotopes, to some extent. Drink heavy water instead of ordinary water for a month and you’ll find yourself gaining weight.
- It’s possible that tribes that shy away from eating meat are less tough, and tribes that hunt turtles for meat are slightly better swimmers due to the fact that everyone needs food every day, but shells are wanted only by some and only occasionally, and thus everyone is swimming every day when the turtles are hunted for their meat.
