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We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.

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
Enjoys
Hockey
Fans
Fun
Enjoy
Bloodlust
Someone
Indulging
Kind
Vicarious
Make
Homer

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With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.
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In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
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Disgust is intuitive microbiology
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Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.
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However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.
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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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Societies that empower women are less violent in every way.
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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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So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.
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Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.
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If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
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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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Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.
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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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Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young.
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Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
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Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak they just do. But reading is different.
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There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.
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