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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.
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
Faces
Evolved
Eye
Locks
Show
Mates
Helping
Signs
Fittest
Shows
Onto
Fertility
Find
Health
Beholder
Would
Beauty
Mate
Help
Predict
More quotes by Steven Pinker
My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
Steven Pinker
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.
Steven Pinker
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
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.
Steven Pinker
Disgust is intuitive microbiology
Steven Pinker
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
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Steven Pinker
The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.
Steven Pinker
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
We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
Steven Pinker
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.
Steven Pinker
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
Steven Pinker
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
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
Steven Pinker
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
Steven Pinker
An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.
Steven Pinker
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Steven Pinker
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.
Steven Pinker
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.
Steven Pinker
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net.
Steven Pinker