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We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?

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
Warm
Ticks
Heaven
Primates
Living
Fleas
Infection
Tick
Dry
Miserable
Infections
Hungry
Primate

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The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
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No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
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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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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
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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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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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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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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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A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
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Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
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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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Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.
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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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For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'
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In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
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Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?
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Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
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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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I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
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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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