"It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Ove...
the mind is a neural computer
More Steven Pinker quotes
"Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism...
"A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.
"The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. Carefree sex is natural and go...
"Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the research...
"The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that...
"Many textbooks point out that no animal has evolved wheels and cite the fact as an example of how evolution is often incapable of finding the optimal ...
"Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that “animals try to spread their genes.” That misstates the facts and it misstates the the...
"I think moralistic science is bad for morals and bad for science.
"The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, e...
"Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer f...
"Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to se...
"What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of...
"Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst fo...
"It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.