“[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 feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work… — 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 immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral...Decisions that have to be made with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of errors, must use some trait as… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share
“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 Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality...[I]f we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have… — Stephen Pinker Copy Share
“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
![“[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 feat we call learning. Those circuits do not make us indiscriminate mimics but have to work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission…” quote by Stephen Pinker](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d2f/stephen-pinker-44434_culture_c-ulture-for-all-its-importance-is-not-s_1151760.jpg)
