Re: What was your favorite part of the book?
I found almost all of
The Blank Slate informative. Rape
is about sex; boys and girls
are different; intelligence
is important; and by and large, the people who claim they are not know perfectly well that they are. But the topic in this book that just completely blew me away was the discussion of core intuitions, found mainly on pages 220 and 221 of my edition.
By the time I got to page 222 of
The Blank Slate, I felt like I understood myself and my cohorts substantially better than I ever had before. From that one short section I have become less prejudiced against theists and more comfortable with myself. "An intuitive physics. . . not Newton's laws. . . an 'oomph' that keeps an object in motion and gradually dissipates". Reading these words was an "aha!" for me, almost on par with Dawkins' explanation of the principle of the selfish gene.
Science is neither a philosophy nor a belief system. It is a combination of mental operations that has become increasingly the habit of educated peoples, a culture of illuminations hit upon by a fortunate turn of history that yielded the most effective way of learning about the real world ever conceived. E.O.Wilson
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