Quote

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.

Steven Pinker

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Find
Health
Beholder
Would
Beauty
Mate
Help
Predict
Faces
Evolved
Eye
Locks
Show
Mates
Helping
Signs
Fittest
Shows
Onto
Fertility

More quotes by Steven Pinker

Image
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
Steven Pinker
Image
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
Steven Pinker
Image
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?'
Steven Pinker
Image
If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
Steven Pinker
Image
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
Steven Pinker
Image
The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
Steven Pinker
Image
As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
Steven Pinker
Image
I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
Image
A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.
Steven Pinker
Image
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
Steven Pinker
Image
For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.
Steven Pinker
Image
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
Steven Pinker
Image
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.
Steven Pinker
Image
In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth.
Steven Pinker
Image
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.
Steven Pinker
Image
Much of what is today called social criticism consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
Steven Pinker
Image
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.
Steven Pinker
Image
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.
Steven Pinker
Image
Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog, that is news ... Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will never run out of news.
Steven Pinker
Image
'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.
Steven Pinker