The irony here is that Pinker then embraces the American prison-industrial complex in The Blank Slate as being a necessary part of this trend, when the US is probably an outlier.

There is a similarity between Pinker (at least in The Blank Slate) and Gray in that they both paint their targets with one big flaw before bashing them. Gray's template straw man is a humanist who didn't read The Selfish Gene.