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
gray-matter differences brain
According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.
laptops programming
My laptop has freed me to travel.
humanity calling overcoming
Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.
motivation inspiration moral
Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.
dog zebras people
You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.
numbers psychology add
The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.
hands use hot
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
emotional political mind
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
psychology criticism trying
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
gmos perception brain
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
sound creatures visuals
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
world language human-nature
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
commitment equality people
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
long world groups
As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.