The Many Faces of Life

by Steven Pinker: One is the doctrine of "the blank slate": that we have no inherent talents or temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the environment, parenting, culture, and society. "The second is "the noble savage": that evil motives are not inherent to people but come from corrupting social institutions. The third is "the ghost in the machine", that the most important part of us is somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary history.