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Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.

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
Large
Armed
Conflict
Scale
Waste
Leading
Resources
Scales
Depends
Ideology
Produce
Necessarily
Scarcity
Change
Misery
Governance
Without
Climate
Resource

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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.
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We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
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Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.
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The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.
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If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.
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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
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Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
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We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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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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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.
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In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods.
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People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.
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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
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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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I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
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I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.
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The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.
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