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
change gone perfect permanent religion religions themselves
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
ecosystem evolved fill niches
The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.
affected conflict equally life theories wisdom
Intellectual life was enormously affected by an understandable revulsion to Nazism, with its pseudoscientific theories of race, and its equally nonsensical glorification of conflict as part of the evolutionary wisdom of nature.
obsessions reflects
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
learned projects quicker
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
children invent language thrown
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
complexity divine expansion gradual spark species suddenly
I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
entire society
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.
question
That isn't really a question that can be answered.
human human-nature theory
All of us have a theory about human nature.
activity result
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
certain common however human might people virtue
It's also a recognition that however much people might vary, they have certain things in common by virtue of their common human nature.
applying aspects behavior charged family mindset psychology taking
Evolutionary psychology is taking that mindset and applying it to more emotionally charged aspects of behavior, such as sexuality, violence, beauty, and family feelings.
people sacred compromise
The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise