Editing Nature versus nurture (section)

=== 1990s ===
Heritability studies became much easier to perform, and hence much more numerous, with the advances of genetic studies during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming amount of evidence had accumulated that amounts to a refutation of the extreme forms of "blank-slatism" advocated by Watson or Montagu.{{citation needed|date=January 2021}}

This revised state of affairs was summarized in books aimed at a popular audience from the late 1990s. In ''[[The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do]]'' (1998), [[Judith Rich Harris]] was heralded by [[Steven Pinker]] as a book that "will come to be seen as a turning point in the [[history of psychology]]."<ref>{{cite book|author=Harris, Judith Rich |title=The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updated|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-uKBJRMJBjcC&pg=PR21|date=24 February 2009|publisher=Simon and Schuster|isbn=978-1-4391-0165-0|pages=21–}}</ref> However, Harris was criticized for exaggerating the point of "parental upbringing seems to matter less than previously thought" to the implication that "parents do not matter."<ref>A position not actually taken by the author, but apparently it was feared that "lay readers" would still interpret the book in this way, as in  "Will it free some to mistreat their kids, since 'it doesn't matter'?", with this fear being attributed to "psychologist Frank Farley of Temple University, president of the APA division that honored Harris" by {{cite news |last=Begley |first=Sharon |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/newsweek/parent090798a.htm |title=The Parent Trap |newspaper=Newsweek |date=1998-09-29}}</ref>

The situation as it presented itself by the end of the 20th century was summarized in ''[[The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature]]'' (2002) by [[Steven Pinker]]. The book became a best-seller, and was instrumental in bringing to the attention of a wider public the paradigm shift away from the behaviourist purism of the 1940s to 1970s that had taken place over the preceding decades.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Blank Slate: the modern denial of human nature {{!}} Workers' Liberty |url=https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2017-07-26/blank-slate-modern-denial-human-nature |access-date=2024-08-21 |website=www.workersliberty.org |language=en}}</ref>

Pinker portrays the adherence to pure ''blank-slatism'' as an ideological [[dogma]] linked to two other dogmas found in the dominant view of human nature in the 20th century:

# "[[noble savage]]," in the sense that people are born good and corrupted by bad influence; and
# "[[ghost in the machine]]," in the sense that there is a human soul capable of moral choices completely detached from biology.

Pinker argues that all three dogmas were held onto for an extended period even in the face of evidence because they were seen as ''desirable'' in the sense that if any human trait is purely conditioned by culture, any undesired trait (such as crime or aggression) may be engineered away by purely cultural (political means). Pinker focuses on reasons he assumes were responsible for unduly repressing evidence to the contrary, notably the fear of (imagined or projected) political or ideological consequences.<ref>{{cite web |author=Pinker, Steven |url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/index.html |title=Steven Pinker – Books – The Blank Slate |publisher=Pinker.wjh.harvard.edu |access-date=2011-01-19 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110510091413/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/index.html |archive-date=2011-05-10}}</ref>