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

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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
Eye
Locks
Show
Mates
Helping
Signs
Fittest
Shows
Onto
Fertility
Find
Health
Beholder
Would
Beauty
Mate
Help
Predict
Faces
Evolved

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People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
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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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Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
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Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
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One of my favourite kinds of movie is the American picaresque, in which the characters make their way across the country, learning about life against the gorgeous backdrops of that vast land.
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Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.
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One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
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Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.
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The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
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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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Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement.
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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.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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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.
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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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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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Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.
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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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Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
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