Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinkeris a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 September 1954
CountryCanada
culture doe acquire
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
brain mind bags
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
compassion capacity reflexes
The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
prayer believe thinking
A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?
cowboy gun europe
America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.
atheism serious jew
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.
writing hockey ice
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
mysterious beneath-the-surface surface
I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something.
radical thinker
I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.
genes genome entirety
Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.
commitment equal-treatment issues
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
business lied life origin
You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet?
economic number personal
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.
actual arranged billion cells goes hundred individual level nerve trillion ways
The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.