Steven Pinker's "Dangerous Idea"

Steven Pinker's dangerous idea is that "Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments".

In a New York Times review of his book The Blank Slate, Pinker "reproaches those ... [who] have created a climate in which ''discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals ... The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues. Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one. "

According to Pinker:

Group differences, when they exist, pertain to the average or variance of a statistical distribution, rather than to individual men and women. Political equality is a commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups; it is not an empirical claim that all groups are indistinguishable. Yet many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points, to say nothing of the wider world community.