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With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Humans
Solution
Many
Solutions
Concern
Violence
Nature
Also
Problem
Human
Concerns

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There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
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Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
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Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.
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If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
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'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
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My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
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I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
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Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
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Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.
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I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.
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The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.
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Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
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I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
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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.
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The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
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Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.
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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't believe in reason.
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I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
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We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
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If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
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