Human nature
Like Eriksen, Louis Menand, writing for "The New Yorker", also claimed that Pinker's arguments constituted a strawman fallacy, stating "[m]any pages of 'The Blank Slate' are devoted to bashing away at the Lockean-Rousseauian-Cartesian scarecrow that Pinker has created." Menand notes that Pinker misquotes and misunderstands Virginia Woolf as saying "In or about December 1910, human nature changed," (Pinker's response was "Woolf was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter.”) Woolf actually wrote "On or about December 1910 human character changed," and she was writing about fiction, critiquing literary realism compared to the modernist movement.