That's weird. I don't get that impression from the review at all. Pinker is a Harvard Professor, and hardly a prole from anyone's point of view. You have to bear in mind that Pinker has put out a series of publications in the past 5-10 years that are extremely patronizing to scholars in the humanities. If you're going to tell entire disciplines that they're doing it all wrong, and that you know how to do it right, then you can't really expect a friendly response. One can imagine the reaction if, for example, historians wrote articles telling physicists how to conduct their research.