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Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

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
Today
Take
Poorer
Country
Backward
Smaller
Granted
Countries
War

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When time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.
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Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
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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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An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
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In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
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The world has far too much morality.
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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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When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.
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Disgust is intuitive microbiology
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It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.
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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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Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.
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No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
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A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.
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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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In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.
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We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
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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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In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
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If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.
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