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You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.

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
Think
Almost
Races
Thinking
Race
Bunch
Upon
Plant
Keep
Soon
Part
Depends
Body
Arms
Antagonistic
Everything
Food
Ecosystem
Would
Animal
Ecosystems

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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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In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
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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.
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Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
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The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
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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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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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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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We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.
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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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If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
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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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No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
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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.
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In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
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Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak they just do. But reading is different.
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My laptop has freed me to travel.
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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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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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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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