“Fundamental values (such as equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murder with an IQ of 64,… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“This is the mentality of a cult, in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one's piety. That mentality cannot coexist with an… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“Fundamental values (such as equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might be refuted… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“Discrimination -in the sense of sustaining a statistical predictive trait of an individual’s group to make a decision about the individual -is not always… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“Chomsky's writings are "classics" in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way. People have… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“[C]ulture, for all its importance, is not some miasma that seeps into people through their skin. Culture relies on neural circuitry that accomplishes the… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
“The general valorization of reason and evidence, scrutiny of social arrangements, open discourse and a reasonable scepticism have all been very healthy developments. The… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share Image
