Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The quotation falsely attributed to Stalin, 'One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,' gets the numbers wrong but… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the relative frequency of remembered or imagined events. That can make… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Thinking is computation, I claim, but that does not mean that the computer is a good metaphor for the mind. The mind… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
