Steven Pinker Quotes
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If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
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Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
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My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
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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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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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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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The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
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Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
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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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Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.