In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods. Steven Pinker More Quotes by Steven Pinker More Quotes From Steven Pinker 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. Steven Pinker truth-is brain sometimes Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is Steven Pinker reading children school A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others. Steven Pinker conclusion input successful Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to deal with new demands. . . Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Steven Pinker demand may fun Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture. Steven Pinker psychology human-nature four We often feel that a clever aphorism captures a truth that would require pages to defend in any other way. Steven Pinker pages clever way Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. Steven Pinker indispensable psychology evolution As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide. Steven Pinker groups long world I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something. Steven Pinker beneath-the-surface surface mysterious As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender. Steven Pinker violence numbers men I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. Steven Pinker radical thinker I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. Steven Pinker writing book years Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Steven Pinker equal-treatment issues commitment Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied. Steven Pinker agency space research Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast. Steven Pinker impossible-things queens believe Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act. Steven Pinker theory-of-evolution atheism would-be But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. Steven Pinker genes possibility cases Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. Steven Pinker empathy violence self People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. Steven Pinker chinese people thinking Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Steven Pinker oral-tradition thoughtful style
