His best-known book The Blank Slate is quite persuasive on this point. He is certainly not the first psychologist to court controversy. Hans Eysenck and Sir Cyril Burt vexed their contemporaries by linking intelligence to race and heredity respectively. They also took a great interest in parapsychology, which doubtless did not endear them to a later generation of more literal-minded psychologists. Pinker has shown no inclination to follow them down the latter route. However, he has much of interest to say and his approach to the puzzles of neuroscience is more honest and deep-thinking than Grayling’s: