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Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes

Psychologist

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Famous Steven Pinker Quotes

“The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. [...] But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error-moral illusions, as it were just like our other faculties.”

PsychologyHuman Nature
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.”

PsychologyHuman Nature
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears: • If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified. • If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile. • If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions. • If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.”

Human NaturePop Psychology
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.”

Human Nature
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“Evolution is central to the understanding of life, including human life. Like all living things, we are outcomes of natural selection; we got here because we inherited traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and reproduce. This momentous fact explains our deepest strivings: why having a thankless child is sharper than a serpent's tooth, why it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, why we do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light”

PsychologyHuman NatureEvolution
Author:Steven Pinker
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“Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call ‘social’ and ‘political’ are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs… they are shared understandings among individuals at a given time and place.”

PhilosophySciencePoliticsPsychologyViolenceSocietyHuman NatureSociologyEvolutionary PsychologySocial Theory
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.”

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Author:Steven Pinker
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“The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.”

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Author:Steven Pinker
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“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”

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Author:Steven Pinker
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“Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.”

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Author:Steven Pinker
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“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

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Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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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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Book:How the Mind Works
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