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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?
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
Human
Moon
Trees
Slugs
Humans
Gave
Cross
Boats
First
Internet
Crosses
Oaks
Produce
Rise
Invent
Tree
Extraordinary
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Process
Evolution
Fish
Seems
Ocean
Fishes
Firsts
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Boat
More quotes by Steven Pinker
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
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Disgust is intuitive microbiology
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A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
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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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My laptop has freed me to travel.
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Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.
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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
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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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The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
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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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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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Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.
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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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Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They let us know the things we need to know, and also things we wish we didn't.
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A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.
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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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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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Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
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Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young.
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