Is Sociobiology Ready for Prime Time?
By NORA S. NEWCOMBE Steven Pinker’s new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking)), consists of 509 pages explaining why we must be serious about human nature and extolling the virtues of the kind of theorizing often called sociobiology. In particular, sociobiologists think that many aspects of animal and human behavior can be understood as biologically based tendencies that evolved in order to increase an individual’s chances of passing his or her genes on to subsequent generations.
