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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
Firsts
Creatures
Boat
Human
Moon
Trees
Slugs
Humans
Gave
Cross
Boats
First
Internet
Crosses
Oaks
Produce
Rise
Invent
Tree
Extraordinary
Creature
Process
Evolution
Fish
Seems
Ocean
Fishes

More quotes by Steven Pinker

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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.
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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.
Steven Pinker
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I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.
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The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.
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Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
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The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
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In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!
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All over the world, belief in the supernatural has authorised the sacrifice of people to propitiate bloodthirsty gods, and the murder of witches for their malevolent powers.
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As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
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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.
Steven Pinker
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The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.
Steven Pinker
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I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.
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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 world has far too much morality.
Steven Pinker
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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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Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't believe in reason.
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Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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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.
Steven Pinker
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Disgust is intuitive microbiology
Steven Pinker