Pinker was "influential" because most people are idiots and they are happy to glom on to pop theories that tell them what they want to hear. Pinker is essentially the Kim Kardashian of history/sociology. People who actually know anything about the topics he opined on think he's a moron for trying to talk about subjects he doesn't know anything about.

Leaving all that to one side, Pinker’s tirade is surprisingly dismissive of academics who have spent their whole lives researching, teaching and publishing in their specialized fields, and who are lumped together as the ‘chattering classes’, ‘those who intellectualize for a living’. This is a bit much coming from a man who works at one of the world’s most prestigious universities and who has literally toured the world spruiking his thesis. The chattering classes are in fact Pinker’s fellow university professors, including two in this volume from his home institution, Harvard University. In some respects, Pinker’s emotive responses are a form of intellectual gaslighting, directed at those who question and criticize his methods, sources and conclusions. Rather than engage in an exchange of ideas – the very essence of the Enlightenment form of truth seeking – he caricatures and then ridicules those who engage with his ideas. As criticism of his two books has mounted, Pinker has gotten shriller and sillier.

Dwyer, Philip; Mark Micale. The Darker Angels of Our Nature (p. 15). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Eisler learned how to be a systems scientist at Rand - and then applied that knowledge to the topics that interested her and that she had studied. She became a cultural historian by delving into the work that supported that. Whether absolutely everyone agrees with her or not (not something that ever happens in academia) she is still the undisputed world expert on these topics. The Chalice and the Blade devotes several chapters to Crete and doesn't gloss over the inherent social stratification in the least. This person fails to recognize that social stratification alone is not the mark of a domination system. Again, people who don't know what they are talking about trying to critique something they don't actually understand is worthless and pointless. You Googling around trying to find "what's wrong" without even being able to speak intelligently about what you are attempting to say is silly.

Eisler is prominent because she's an actual subject matter expert - someone who has taught at the university level on her work. Pinker is prominent for having written a book that sold well (being a kind of Kim Kardashian). He teaches psychology - and not the topics covered in his book. Eisler's evidence and citations add up. Pinker's do not. Only people who don't actually know anything about the topics he writes about think he's "important."

The contributors in this volume, however, believe that any conscientious and ethically up-to-date account of violence in the past and present, especially one that claims comprehensive coverage, should include such human behavioural phenomena as interpersonal violence, environmental violence, violence against indigenous people, violence in prisons, human trafficking and cyber-violence, to cite only several omissions in Pinker’s world view.

Apparently, Pinker feels that his ideas are beyond the basic process of hypothesis testing. Instead of evaluating the idea content of his books, he has expected audiences just to ‘rejoice’ that, like some prophet or Prometheus-figure, he has delivered the truth to us about the past, present and future of humanity.

Dwyer, Philip; Mark Micale. The Darker Angels of Our Nature (p. 16). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Edit: I don’t consider anything coming from Fox News as a “reputable source.” On the other hand, I do take critique coming from actual academic experts in the field a little more seriously, particularly when they can meaningfully support their position with something of substance.

Pinker thinks the only important marker of violence in a society is war (and a smattering of institutional torture) — not slavery, or sex-trafficking, or domestic violence, or suicides — or any other common form of societal violence. It’s reductive and doesn’t even get the statistics right on those fronts. Read Darker Angels and it I doubt you will ever cite Pinker again for anything other than how not to be a serious authority on a given topic.