“Discrimination -in the sense of sustaining a statistical predictive trait of an individual’s group to make a decision about the individual -is… — 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
![“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 different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils. The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life...come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children...or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the final solution because they thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist...” quote by Stephen Pinker](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/9a7/stephen-pinker-44434_character_the-greatest-moral-appeal-of-the-doctrin_790205.jpg)
![“[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 of culture possible. That is why it is not an alternative to a focus on learning, culture and socialization, but rather an attempt to explain how they work.” 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)
