Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinkeris a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 September 1954
CountryCanada
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Evolutionary psychology is taking that mindset and applying it to more emotionally charged aspects of behavior, such as sexuality, violence, beauty, and family feelings.
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During the past century the doctrine of the blank slate has set the agenda for much of the social sciences and humanities, ... ... Psychology has sought to explain all thought, feeling, and behavior with a few simple mechanisms of learning.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.
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There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
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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 only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.
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Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
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Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
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Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.
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You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.
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Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
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Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
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M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
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One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic.