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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

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
Happens
Sheer
World
Bound
People
Bounds
Statisticians
Number
Statistician
Numbers
Coincidences
Happen
Governed
Chance
Coincidence
Tell
Underestimate

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Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.
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The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
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I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
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There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
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Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn x (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)
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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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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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If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
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Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.
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Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
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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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I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
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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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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.
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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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As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
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As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
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The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
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