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America Had, For One Thing, Lived In Anarchy For - Until Much More Recently Than Europe. We Had The Wild West, Where The Cliche Of The Cowboy Movies Was The Nearest Sheriff Is 90 Miles Away, And So You Had To Pack A Gun And Defend Yourself.

-Steven Pinker

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America Had, For One

Steven Pinker

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America Had, For One Thing, Lived In Anarchy For - Until Much More Recently Than Europe. We Had The Wild West, Where The Cliche Of The Cowboy Movies Was The Nearest Sheriff Is 90 Miles Away, And So You Had To Pack A Gun And Defend Yourself.

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Climate Change Could Produce A Lot Of Misery And Waste Without Necessarily Leading To Large-scale Armed Conflict, Which Depends More On Ideology And Bad Governance Than On Resource Scarcity.

I Think This Confusion Leads Intellectuals And Artists Themselves To Believe That The Elite Arts And Humanities Are A Kind Of Higher, Exalted Form Of Human Endeavor.

According To A Recent Study Of The Brains Of Identical And Fraternal Twins, Differences In The Amount Of Gray Matter In The Frontal Lobes Are Not Only Genetically Influenced But Are Significantly Correlated With Differences In Intelligence.

The Elevation Of Parochial Values To The Realm Of The Sacred Is A License To Dismiss Other People's Interests, And An Imperative To Reject The Possibility Of Compromise

By All Measures Men Are The More Violent Gender.

I Don't Consider Myself To Be That Radical A Thinker.

Plants Can't Very Well Defend Themselves By Their Behavior, So They Resort To Chemical Warfare, And Plants Are Saturated With Toxins And Irritants To Deter Creatures Like Us Who Want To Eat Them.

In Fact, Without A Specification Of A Creature's Goals, The Very Idea Of Intelligence Is Meaningless. A Toadstool Could Be Given A Genius Award For Accomplishing With Pinpoint Precision And Unerring Reliability, The Feat Of Sitting Exactly Where It Is Sitting. Nothing Would Prevent Us From Agreeing With The Cognitive Scientist Zenon Pylyshyn That Rocks Are Smarter Than Cats Because Rocks Have The Sense To Go Away When You Kick Them.

We're Living In Primate Heaven. We're Warm, Dry, We're Not Hungry, We Don't Have Fleas And Ticks And Infections. So Why Are We So Miserable?

Words Let Us Say The Things We Want To Say And Also Things We Would Be Better Off Not Having Said. They Let Us Know The Things We Need To Know, And Also Things We Wish We Didn't.

My Politics Were Pretty Anarchistic Until 1969 When The Montreal Police Went On Strike. Within Hours, Mayhem And Rioting Broke Out And The Mounties Had To Be Called In To Restore Order. It Instilled In Me That One's Convictions Can Be Subjected To Empirical Test.

One Of The Things That People Complain About Is Loneliness, Disconnectedness. If You Live In A Society Where Your Life Is Rarely Threatened And Most Of Your Relationships Are More On An Economic Exchange Basis, Then This Could Leave People Feeling Less Connected.

In Any Dispute, Each Side Thinks It's In The Right And The Other Side Is Demons.

Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology

Economic Libertarians And Christian Evangelicals, United By Their Common Enemy, Are Strange Bedfellows In Today's Republican Party, Just As The Two Georges - The Archconservative Wallace And The Uberliberal Mcgovern - Found Themselves In The Same Democratic Party In 1972.

Knowing There Is A World That Will Outlive You, There Are People Whose Well-being Depends On How You Live Your Life, Affects The Way You Live Your Life, Whether Or Not You Directly Experience Those Effects. You Want To Be The Kind Of Person Who Has The Larger View, Who Takes Other People's Interests Into Account, Who's Dedicated To The Principles That You Can Justify, Like Justice, Knowledge, Truth, Beauty And Morality.

I Would Argue That Nothing Gives Life More Purpose Than The Realization That Every Moment Of Consciousness Is A Precious And Fragile Gift.

Whenever You Speak To Someone, You Are Presuming The Two Of You Have A Certain Degree Of Familiarity - Which Your Words Might Alter. So Every Sentence Has To Do Two Things At Once: Convey A Message And Continue To Negotiate That Relationship.

Commerce, Trade And Exchange Make Other People More Valuable Alive Than Dead, And Mean That People Try To Anticipate What The Other Guy Needs And Wants. It Engages The Mechanisms Of Reciprocal Altruism, As The Evolutionary Biologists Call It, As Opposed To Raw Dominance.

Conventions Are Unstated Agreements Within A Community To Abide By A Single Way Of Doing Things - Not Because There Is Any Inherent Advantage To The Choice, But Because There Is An Advantage To Everyone Making The Same Choice.

Writers Acquire Their Technique By Spotting, Savoring, And Reverse-engineering Examples Of Good Prose.

The Likelihood That Inborn Differences Are One Contributor To Social Status Does Not Mean That It Is The Only Contributor.

Thinking Is A Physical Process, The Human Brain Is Not Exempt From Evolution

But In Most Cases Even The Possibility That The Correlations Reflect Shared Genes Is Taboo.

People Are Under The Impression That Dictionaries Legislate Language. What A Dictionary Does Is Keep Track Of Usages Over Time.

Natural Selection Is Not The Only Process That Changes Organisms Over Time. But Is The Only Process That Seemingly Designs Organisms Over Time.

I Teach Classes 28 Weeks Of The Year, But The Rest Of The Time I Do Research And Write Books.

Since The Point Of Erotica Is To Offer The Consumer Sexual Experiences Without Having To Compromise With The Demands Of The Other Sex, It Is A Window Into Each Sex's Unalloyed Desires. Pornography For Men Is Visual, Anatomical, Impulsive, Floridly Promiscuous And Devoid Of Context And Character. Erotica For Women Is Far More Likely To Be Verbal, Psychological, Reflective, Serially Monogamous And Rich In Context And Character. Men Fantasise About Copulating With Bodies; Women Fantasise About Making Love To People.

I Think The Reason That Swearing Is Both So Offensive And So Attractive Is That It Is A Way To Push People's Emotional Buttons, And Especially Their Negative Emotional Buttons. Because Words Soak Up Emotional Connotations And Are Processed Involuntarily By The Listener, You Can't Will Yourself Not To Treat The Word In Terms Of What It Means.

Something About The Topic Of Consciousness Makes People, Like The White Queen In Through The Looking Glass, Believe Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Impossible Things

The Mind Is A Neural Computer

The World Has Far Too Much Morality.

Morality, Then, Is Not A Set Of Arbitrary Regulations Dictated By A Vengeful Deity And Written Down In A Book; Nor Is It The Custom Of A Particular Culture Or Tribe. It Is A Consequence Of The Interchangeability Of Perspectives And The Opportunity The World Provides For Positive-sum Games.

I Don't Think Aggression Works Like Thirst Or Sleep. I Think Aggression Is More Elicited By Particular Situations. I Think It Can Be Mitigated.

Forcing Modern Speakers Of English To Not - Whoops, Not To Split An Infinitive Because It Isn't Done In Latin Makes About As Much Sense As Forcing Modern Residents Of England To Wear Laurels And Togas.

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.

I Think Students Should Know Something About Religion As A Historical Phenomenon, In The Same Way That They Should Know Something About Socialism And Humanism And The Other Great Ideas That Have Shaped Political Philosophies And Therefore The Course Of Human Events.

Everyone's Pedigree Merges Into Everyone Else's Pedigree. So If You Go Back Far Enough, Everyone Is Related.

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.

Meaning Of Life

With Violence, As With So Many Other Concerns, Human Nature Is The Problem, But Human Nature Is Also The Solution.

You Know That When Irving Puts The Dog In The Car, It Is No Longer In The Yard. When Edna Goes To Church, Her Head Goes With Her. If Doug Is In The House, He Must Have Gone Through Some Opening Unless He Was Born There And Never Left. If Sheila Is Alive At 9 A.m. And Is Alive At 5 P.m., She Was Also Alive At Noon. Zebras In The Wild Never Wear Underwear. Opening A Jar Of A New Brand Of Peanut Butter Will Not Vaporize The House. People Never Shove Meat Thermometers In Their Ears. A Gerbil Is Smaller Than Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The Theory That Religion Is A Force For Peace, Often Heard Among The Religious Right And Its Allies Today, Does Not Fit The Facts Of History.

Consciousness Turns Out To Consist Of A Maelstrom Of Events Distributed Across The Brain. These Events Compete For Attention, And As One Process Outshouts The Others, The Brain Rationalizes The Outcome After The Fact And Concocts The Impression That A Single Self Was In Charge All Along.

The Elegant Study... Is Consistent With The Themes Of Modern Cognitive Neuroscience . Every Aspect Of Thought And Emotion Is Rooted In Brain Structure And Function, Including Many Psychological Disorders And, Presumably, Genius. The Study Confirms That The Brain Is A Modular System Comprising Multiple Intelligences, Mostly Nonverbal.

Psychological Disorders

Photography Is A Demanding Action Sport. The Light Can Change So Quickly. I Often Find Myself Sprinting So That I Can Catch The Perfect Light Falling On A Photogenic Subject.

We Can Shape Events In Each Other's Brains With Exquisite Precision.

[napoleon Deployed] Every Available Resource To Inflict All-out Defeats On [his] Enemies.

There's Guilt About Our Treatment Of Native Peoples In Modern Intellectual Life, And An Unwillingness To Acknowledge There Could Be Anything Good About Western Culture.

Western Culture

If The Cartoon Were Completely Accurate, Though, Life Would Be A Cacophany Of Spoinks.

Semantics Is About The Relation Of Words To Thoughts, But It Also About The Relation Of Words To Other Human Concerns. Semantics Is About The Relation Of Words To Reality - The Way That Speakers Commit Themselves To A Shared Understanding Of The Truth, And The Way Their Thoughts Are Anchored To Things And Situations In The World.

As Technology Accumulates And People In More Parts Of The Planet Become Interdependent, The Hatred Between Them Tends To Decrease, For The Simple Reason That You Can't Kill Someone And Trade With Him Too.

People Have Long Assumed That Violence Is Necessary For Political Change. Rulers Never Cede Power Voluntarily, The Argument Goes, So Progressives Have No Choice But To Contemplate The Use Of Force To Bring About A Better World, Mindful Of The Trade-off Between A Small Amount Of Violence Now And Acceptance Of An Unjust Status Quo Indefinitely.

Solving A Problem In A Hundred Years Is, Practically Speaking, The Same As Not Solving It At All.

The 9/11 Strikes Left An Indelible Impact On Our Minds, But In Relative Terms, The Scale Of Casualties Actually Wasn't All That High.

We Are All Members Of The Same Flawed Species. Putting Our Moral Vision Into Practice Means Imposing Our Will On Others. The Human Lust For Power And Esteem, Coupled With Its Vulnerability To Self-deception And Self-righteousness, Makes That An Invitation To A Calamity, All The Worse When The Power Is Directed At A Goal As Quixotic As Eradicating Human Self-interest.

It's Likely That Taboo Words Are Stored In The Right Hemisphere Of The Brain. Massive Left Hemisphere Strokes Or The Entire Surgical Removal Of The Left Hemisphere Can Leave People With No Articulate Speech Other Than The Ability To Swear, Spout Cliches And Song Lyrics.

The Idea That Children Are Passive Repositories To Be Shaped By Their Parents Has Been Massively Overstated. A Child's Peer Group Is A Far Greater Determinant Of Its Development And Achievements Than Parental Aspiration.

Students Do Everything On Laptops These Days, So I Definitely Think Electronic Books Are A Trend That's Going To Expand.

Knowledge Is A Continuous Fabric, In Which Ideas Are Connected To Other Ideas. Reason-free Zones, In Which People Can Assert Arbitrary Beliefs Safe From Ordinary Standards Of Evaluation, Can Only Corrupt This Fabric, Just As A Contradiction Can Corrupt A System Of Logic, Allowing Falsehoods To Proliferate Through It.

Just As Blueprints Don't Necessarily Specify Blue Buildings, Selfish Genes Don't Necessarily Specify Selfish Organisms. As We Shall See, Sometimes The Most Selfish Thing A Gene Can Do Is Build A Selfless Brain. Genes Are A Play Within A Play, Not The Interior Monologue Of The Players.

The Typical Imperative From Biology Is Not "thou Shalt... ," But "if ... Then ... Else.

For One Thing, Before The 20th Century, There Were Plenty Of Genocides. We Tend To Forget About Them, Partly Because They Weren't As Well Documented And Partly Because, Until Recently, People Didn't Care. We Used Euphemisms Like 'sackings' And 'sieges' Instead Of Calling Them 'genocides.'

'capitalism' Is A Dirty Word For Many Intellectuals, But There Are A Number Of Studies Showing That Open Economies And Free Trade Are Negatively Correlated With Genocide And War.

I Suspect Music Is Auditory Cheesecake, An Exquisite Confection Crafted To Tickle The Sensitive Spots Of... Our Mental Faculties.

We Can Make Fun Of Hockey Fans, But Someone Who Enjoys Homer Is Indulging The Same Kind Of Vicarious Bloodlust.

We Instinctively Fear Snakes, But We Appear Not To Be Afraid Of Fast Cars, Which Are A Real Danger Now. This Suggests Our Emotions Were Shaped By Our Evolutionary Environment Not The One We Grew Up In.

An Eye For Beauty Locks Onto Faces That Show Signs Of Health And Fertility - Just As One Would Predict If It Had Evolved To Help The Beholder Find The Fittest Mate.

Reason Is Non-negotiable. Try To Argue Against It, Or To Exclude It From Some Realm Of Knowledge, And You've Already Lost The Argument, Because You're Using Reason To Make Your Case. ... We Don't "believe" In Reason.

The Human Capacity For Compassion Is Not A Reflex That Is Triggered Automatically By The Presence Of Another Living Thing.

Societies That Empower Women Are Less Violent In Every Way.

Empowering Women

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. Overcoming Naive Impressions To Figure Out How Things Really Work Is One Of Humanity's Highest Callings.

All Over The World, Belief In The Supernatural Has Authorised The Sacrifice Of People To Propitiate Bloodthirsty Gods, And The Murder Of Witches For Their Malevolent Powers.

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?'

The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs, At Least Not If You Want Them To Listen To You. You Can’t Say That My Interests Are Special Compared To Yours Any More Than You Can Say That The Particular Spot That I Am Standing On Is A Unique Part Of The Universe Because I Happen To Be Standing On It That Very Minute.

By Exploring The Political And Moral Colorings Of Discoveries About What Makes Us Tick, We Can Have A More Honest Science And A Less Fearful Intellectual Milieu.

We Really Are Creatures Of A Violent World, Biologically Speaking - Watching Violence And Learning About It Is One Of Our Cognitive Drives.

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.

You Could Think Of An Ecosystem As A Bunch Of Antagonistic Arms Races, Almost: Everything That An Animal Depends Upon For Food Is The Body Part Of Some Other Animal Or Plant Who Would Just As Soon Keep That Body Part For Itself.

I Think That Metaphor Really Is A Key To Explaining Thought And Language. The Human Mind Comes Equipped With An Ability To Penetrate The Cladding Of Sensory Appearance And Discern The Abstract Construction Underneath - Not Always On Demand, And Not Infallibly, But Often Enough And Insightfully Enough To Shape The Human Condition. Our Powers Of Analogy Allow Us To Apply Ancient Neural Structures To Newfound Subject Matter, To Discover Hidden Laws And Systems In Nature, And Not Least, To Amplify The Expressive Power Of Language Itself.

Commerce Is A Noble Profession, And Jews Should Get Over Any Self-hatred They Might Harbor From Contemplating The Capitalist Spirit Of Diaspora Judaism.

I Never Outgrew My Conversion To Atheism At 13, But At Various Times Was A Serious Cultural Jew.

The Foundation Of Individual Rights Is The Assumption That People Have Wants And Needs And Are Authorities On What Those Wants And Needs Are. If People's Stated Desires Were Just Some Kind Of Erasable Inscription Or Reprogrammable Brainwashing, Any Atrocity Could Be Justified.

Much Of What Is Today Called "social Criticism" Consists Of Members Of The Upper Classes Denouncing The Tastes Of The Lower Classes (bawdy Entertainment, Fast Food, Plentiful Consumer Goods) While Considering Themselves Egalitarians.

In Societies No Less Than Individuals, Acknowledging Our Limitations May Ultimately Be More Humane Than Denying Them.

Racism, Because It Favors Color Over Talent, Is Bad For Business.

As Many Political Writers Have Pointed Out, Commitment To Political Equality Is Not An Empirical Claim That People Are Clones.

But The Newest Research Is Showing That Many Properties Of The Brain Are Genetically Organized, And Don't Depend On Information Coming In From The Senses.

In A High Tech World The Cure For The Tragic Shortcomings And Perilous Fallacies Of Human Intuition Is Education, But Education In Economics, Evolutionary Biology, Probability And Statistics - Unfortunately Most High School And College Curricula Have Barely Changed Since Medieval Times!

Equality Is Not The Empirical Claim That All Groups Of Humans Are Interchangeable; It Is The Moral Principle That Individuals Should Not Be Judged Or Constrained By The Average Properties Of Their Group.

Heritability Pertains To The Entirety Of The Genome, Not To A Single Gene.

No One Knows What The Nongenetic Causes Of Individuality Are. Perhaps People Are Shaped By Modifications Of Genes That Take Place After Conception, Or By Haphazard Fluctuations In The Chemical Soup In The Womb Or The Wiring Up Of The Brain Or The Expression Of The Genes Themselves.

The Rules Of Friendship Are Tacit, Unconscious; They Are Not Rational. In Business, Though, You Have To Think Rationally.

Human Evolution, At First, Seems Extraordinary. How Could The Process That Gave Rise To Slugs And Oak Trees And Fish Produce A Creature That Can Fly To The Moon And Invent The Internet And Cross The Ocean In Boats?

As A Graduate Student, I Wrote A Long Paper Connecting The Dots Between Mathematical Models Of Learning And Language Development In Children. It Was Published In A Major Journal.

As An Experimental Psychologist, I Have Been Trained Not To Believe Anything Unless It Can Be Demonstrated In The Laboratory On Rats Or Sophomores.

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.

Most Intellectuals Today Have A Phobia Of Any Explanation Of The Mind That Invokes Genetics.

Journalists Say That When A Dog Bites A Man, That Is Not News, But When A Man Bites A Dog, That Is News ... Thanks To The Mathematics Of Combinatorics, We Will Never Run Out Of News.

America Had, For One Thing, Lived In Anarchy For - Until Much More Recently Than Europe. We Had The Wild West, Where The Cliche Of The Cowboy Movies Was The Nearest Sheriff Is 90 Miles Away, And So You Had To Pack A Gun And Defend Yourself.

Unfortunately, Creative People Are At Their Most Creative When Writing Their Autobiographies.

I Spent 20 Years Doing Research On Regular And Irregular Verbs, Not Because I'm An Obsessive Language Lover But Because It Seemed To Me That They Tapped Into A Fundamental Distinction In Language Processing, Indeed In Cognitive Processing, Between Memory Lookup And Rule-driven Computation.

If Crime Is Going Down, You Shouldn't Be Increasing Resources For Crime Prevention. Or You Should Be Taking Note Of What Has Worked And Concentrate The Crime-prevention Methods On Policies That Have A Track Record Of Success.

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.

We Often Feel That A Clever Aphorism Captures A Truth That Would Require Pages To Defend In Any Other Way.

Galileo Wrote That 'the Book Of Nature Is Written In The Language Of Mathematics; Without Its Help It Is Impossible To Comprehend A Single Word Of It.'

Babies Are Born With The Instinct To Speak, The Way Spiders Are Born With The Instinct To Spin Webs. You Don't Need To Train Babies To Speak; They Just Do. But Reading Is Different.

I Think A Lot Of Moral Debates Are Not Over What Is The Basis Of Justice, But Who Gets A Ticket To Play In The Game.

The Idea That Boys Want To Sleep With Their Mothers Strikes Most Men As The Silliest Thing They Have Ever Heard. Obviously, It Did Not Seem So To Freud, Who Wrote That As A Boy He Once Had An Erotic Reaction To Watching His Mother Dressing. But Freud Had A Wet-nurse, And May Not Have Experienced The Early Intimacy That Would Have Tipped Off His Perceptual System That Mrs. Freud Was His Mother. The Westermarck Theory Has Out-freuded Freud.

Theories Of Art Carry The Seeds Of Their Own Destruction.

The Reason I'm Not A Neurobiologist But A Cognitive Psychologist Is That I Think Looking At Brain Tissue Is Often The Wrong Level Of Analysis. You Have To Look At A Higher Level Of Organization.

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.

Technology, Ideology, And Social And Cultural Changes Periodically Throw Out New Forms Of Violence For Humanity To Contend With.

The Doctrine Of The Sacredness Of The Soul Sounds Vaguely Uplifting, But In Fact Is Highly Malignant. It Discounts Life On Earth As Just A Temporary Phase That People Pass Through, Indeed, An Infinitesimal Fraction Of Their Existence…the Gradual Replacement Of Lives For Souls As The Locus Of Moral Value Was Helped Along By The Ascendency Of Skepticism And Reason

Genes Are A Play Within A Play, Not The Interior Monologue Of The Players.

Since Violence Is Largely A Male Pastime, Cultures That Empower Women Tend To Move Away From The Glorification Of Violence And Are Less Likely To Breed Dangerous Subcultures Of Rootless Young Men.

All Of The Violence That Doesn't Occur Doesn't Get Reported On The News.

Human Nature Is Complex. Even If We Do Have Inclinations Toward Violence, We Also Have Inclination To Empathy, To Cooperation, To Self-control.

There Has To Be Innate Circuitry That Does The Learning, That Creates The Culture, That Acquires The Culture, And That Responds To Socialization.

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.

Why Is It Surprising That Scientists Might Have Long Hair And Wear Cowboy Boots? In Fields Like Neuroscience, Where The Events You Are Recording Are So Minute, I Suspect Scientists Cultivate A Boring, Reliable Image. A Scientist With A Reputation For Flamboyance Might Be Suspect.

Language Is A Window Into Human Nature, But It Is Also A Fistula, An Open Wound Through Which We're Exposed To An Infectious World.

The Rights Revolutions Too Have Given Us Ideals That Educated People Today Take For Granted But That Are Virtually Unprecedented In Human History, Such As That People Of All Races And Creeds Have Equal Rights, That Women Should Be Free From All Forms Of Coercion, That Children Should Never, Ever Be Spanked, That Students Should Be Protected From Bullying, And That There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Gay. I Don’t Find It At All Implausible That These Are Gifts, In Part, Of A Refined And Widening Application Of Reason.

Academics Lack Perspective. In A Debate On Whether The World Is Round, They Would Argue, 'no,' Because It's An Oblate Spheroid. They Suffer From 'the Curse Of Knowledge': The Inability To Imagine What It's Like Not To Know Something That They Know.

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.

... People Notice Differences And Expect Every Difference In Form To Convey Some Difference In Meaning.

If We Are Not To Abandon Values Such As Peace And Equality, Or Our Commitments To Science And Truth, Then We Must Pry These Values Away From Claims About Our Psychological Makeup That Are Vulnerable To Being Proven False.

Fiction Is Empathy Technology.

The Linguistic Clumsiness Of Tourists And Students Might Be The Price We Pay For The Linguistic Genius We Displayed As Babies, Just As The Decrepitude Of Age In The Price We Pay For The Vigor Of Youth.

Reading Is A Technology For Perspective-taking. When Someone Else's Thoughts Are In Your Head, You Are Observing The World From That Person's Vantage Point.

There's A Misconception That Survival Of The Fittest Means Survival Of The Most Aggressive. The Adjective 'darwinian' Used To Refer To Ruthless Competition; You Used To Read That In Business Journals. But That's Not What Darwinian Means To A Biologist; It's Whatever Leads To Reproductive Success.

As Women Are Empowered, Violence Can Come Down, For A Number Of Reasons. By All Measures, Men Are The More Violent Gender.

Equity Feminism Is A Moral Doctrine About Equal Treatment That Makes No Commitments Regarding Open Empirical Issues In Psychology Or Biology.

Equal Treatment

Most Wars Are Not Fought Over Shortages Of Resources Such As Food And Water, But Rather Over Conquest, Revenge, And Ideology.

Evolutionary Psychologists Seem To Want To Unmask Our Noblest Motives As Ultimately Self-interested - To Show That Our Love For Children, Compassion For The Unfortunate And Sense Of Justice Are Just Tactics In A Darwinian Struggle To Perpetuate Our Genes.

The Moral, Then, Is That Familiar Categories Of Behavior - Marriage Customs, Food Taboos, Folk Superstitions, And So On - Certainly Do Vary Across Cultures And Have To Be Learned, But The Deeper Mechanisms Of Mental Computation That Generate Them May Be Universal And Innate.

Pre-state Societies Were Far More Violent Than Our Own.

Northeastern And Most Coastal States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Is More Closely Aligned With International Cooperation And Engagement, Secularism And Science, Gun Control, Individual Freedom In Culture And Sexuality, And A Greater Role For The Government In Protecting The Environment And Ensuring Economic Equality.

However Much We Might Deplore The Profit Motive, Or Consumerist Values, If Everyone Just Wants I-pods We Would Probably Be Better Off Than If They Wanted Class Revolution.

Sex And Excretion Are Reminders That Anyone's Claim To Round-the-clock Dignity Is Tenuous. The So-called Rational Animal Has A Desperate Drive To Pair Up And Moan And Writhe.

The Art Of Photography Is All About Directing The Attention Of The Viewer.

A Word Is An Arbitrary Label - That's The Foundation Of Linguistics. But Many People Think Otherwise. They Believe In Word Magic: That Uttering A Spell, Incantation, Curse, Or Prayer Can Change The World. Don't Snicker: Would You Ever Say, 'nothing Has Gone Wrong Yet' Without Looking For Wood To Knock?

Paris Hilton, It Turns Out, Is Related To Fellow Celebrity Jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor And G. Gordon Liddy.

The Costs Of An Ignorance Of Science Are Nor Just Practical Ones Like Misbegotten Policies, Forgone Cures, And A Unilateral Disarmament In National Competitiveness. There Is A Moral Cost As Well. It Is An Astonishing Fact About Our Species That We Understand So Much About The History Of The Universe. The Forces That Make It Tick, The Stuff It's Made Of; The Origin Of Living Things, And The Machinery Of Life. A Failure To Nurture This Knowledge Shows A Philistine Indifference To The Magnificent Achievements Humanity Is Capable Of; Like Allowing A Great Work Of Art To Molder In A Warehouse.

Evolution Is An Indispensable Component Of Any Satisfying Explanation Of Our Psychology.

Photography Is A Kind Of Virtual Reality, And It Helps If You Can Create The Illusion Of Being In An Interesting World.

I Do Look For Openings Where I Can Overturn Popular Misconceptions, But Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I Am Neither A Contrarian Nor A Lone Heretic. I Like To Have A Significant Number Of Academics Watching My Back.

Without Goals The Very Concept Of Intelligence Is Meaningless

When A Scientist Considers All High-tech Mental Machinery Needed To Arrange Words Into Ordinary Sentences, Prescriptive Rules Are, At Best, Inconsequential Little Decorations. The Very Fact That They Have To Be Drilled Shows That They Are Alien To The Natural Workings Of The Language System. One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

The Last 100 Years Of Research Into The Human Brain...sees The Brain As An Organ That Works By Physical Principles Just Like The Other Organs In The Body...our Emotions And Higher Callings, Such As Religion, As Well As Our Grubby Low-level Physical Systems Like Stereo Vision And Motor Control, Are Products Of A Machine.

All Our Behaviours Are A Result Of Neurophysiological Activity In The Brain. There Is No Reason To Believe There Is Any Magic Going On.

Nature Is A Hanging Judge," Goes An Old Saying. Many Tragedies Come From Our Physical And Cognitive Makeup. Our Bodies Are Extraordinarily Improbable Arrangements Of Matter, With Many Ways For Things To Go Wrong And Only A Few Ways For Things To Go Right. We Are Certain To Die, And Smart Enough To Know It. Our Minds Are Adapted To A World That No Longer Exists, Prone To Misunderstandings Correctable Only By Arduous Education, And Condemned To Perplexity About The Deepest Questions We Can Ascertain.

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.

Thanks To The Redundancy Of Language, Yxx Cxn Xndxrstxnd Whxt X Xm Wrxtxng Xvxn Xf X Rxplxcx Xll Thx Vxwxls Wxth Xn "x" (t Gts Lttl Hrdr F Y Dn't Vn Kn Whr Th Vwls R)

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.

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.

Astrology Had An Important Role In The Ancient World. You Can't Understand Many Things Unless You Know Something About Astrology - The Plays Of Shakespeare And So On.

Being Smarter Gives You A Tailwind Throughout Life. People Who Are More Intelligent Earn More, Live Longer, Get Divorced Less, Are Less Likely To Get Addicted To Alcohol And Tobacco, And Their Children Live Longer.

Democracy Is An Imperfect Way Of Steering Between The Violence Of Anarchy And The Violence Of Tyranny, With The Least Violence You Can Get Away With.

The Great Appeal Of The Doctrine That The Mind Is A Blank Slate Is The Simple Mathematical Fact That Zero Equals Zero.

One Of The Perks Of Being A Psychologist Is Access To Tools That Allow You To Carry Out The Injunction To Know Thyself.

For Example, Parents Who Talk A Lot To Their Children Have Kids With Better Language Skills, Parents Who Spank Have Children Who Grow Up To Be Violent, Parents Who Are Neither Too Authoritarian Or Too Lenient Have Children Who Are Well-adjusted, And So On.

My Opinions About Human Nature Are Shared By Many Psychologists, Linguists, And Biologists, Not To Mention Philosophers And Scholars Going Back Centuries.

If The Myth Of Pure Evil Is That Evil Is Committed With The Intention Of Causing Harm And An Absence Of Moral Considerations, Then It Applies To Very Few Acts Of So-called 'pure Evil' Because Most Evildoers Believe What They Are Doing Is Forgivable Or Justifiable.

I Like Ice Hockey. No One Is Ever Going To Ask Me To Write About That As A Metaphor For Life.

Humans Are So Innately Hardwired For Language That They Can No More Suppress Their Ability To Learn And Use Language Than They Can Suppress The Instinct To Pull A Hand Back From A Hot Surface.

The Indispensability Of Reason Does Not Imply That Individual People Are Always Rational Or Are Unswayed By Passion And Illusion. It Only Means That People Are Capable Of Reason, And That A Community Of People Who Choose To Perfect This Faculty And To Exercise It Openly And Fairly Can Collectively Reason Their Way To Sounder Conclusions In The Long Run. As Lincoln Observed, You Can Fool All Of The People Some Of The Time, And You Can Fool Some Of The People All Of The Time, But You Can't Fool All Of The People All Of The Time.

In The Past Two Decades Anthropologists Have Gathered Data On Life And Death In Pre-state Societies Rather Than Accepting The Warm And Fuzzy Stereotypes. What Did They Find? In A Nutshell: Hobbes Was Right, Rousseau Was Wrong.

What A Dull Universe It Would Be If Everything In It Conformed To Our Expectations, If It Held Nothing To Surprise Or Baffle Us Or Confound Our Common Sense. A Century Ago No One Foresaw The Existence Of Black Holes, An Expanding Universe, Oceans On Jupiter's Moons, Or Dna. What Could Be More Enriching Than To Know That We Share A Common Origin With All Living Things, That We Are Kin To Chimpanzees, Redwoods And Mollusks? And Isn't It A Source Of Wonder To Realize That The Iron In Our Blood And The Calcium In Our Bones Were Created In The Bellies Of Supernovas?

If Anything, Powerpoint, If Used Well, Would Ideally Reflect The Way We Think.

Education Is A Technology That Tries To Make Up For What The Human Mind Is Innately Bad At. Children Don't Have To Go To School To Learn How To Walk, Talk, Recognize Objects, Or Remember The Personalities Of Their Friends, Even Though These Tasks Are Much Harder Than Reading, Adding, Or Remembering Dates In History. They Do Have To Go To School To Learn Written Language, Arithmetic, And Science, Because Those Bodies Of Knowledge And Skill Were Invented Too Recently For Any Species-wide Knack For Them To Have Evolved.

The Connections I Draw Between Human Nature And Political Systems In My New Book, For Example, Were Prefigured In The Debates During The Enlightenment And During The Framing Of The American Constitution.

Terrorist Bombings, Like Rampage Shootings, Are Events That Maximize The Amount Of Publicity Per Amount Of Damage. That's Why People Do Them, Because They Know They Will Set Off A Media Frenzy.

Jews Are Known For Many Things, But Strength, Swiftness, And Agility Are Not Among Them. There Is One Trait, As Controversial As It Is Familiar, For Which Jews Are Above All Known, And That Is Shrewdness In Business.

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.

Pursuit Of Happiness

My Laptop Has Freed Me To Travel.

Consciousness Surely Does Not Depend On Language. Babies, Many Animals, And Patients Robbed Of Speech By Brain Damage Are Not Insensate Robots; They Have Reactions Like Ours That Indicate That Someone's Home.

There Is No Society Ever Discovered In The Remotest Corner Of The World That Has Not Had Something That We Would Consider The Arts. Visual Arts - Decoration Of Surfaces And Bodies - Appears To Be A Human Universal.

A Decent Government With An Effective, But Not Gratuitously Violent, Police Force And A Fair Court System Are Essential. This Deters And Incapacitates Psychopaths, Bullies And Hotheads - And If It Earns The Confidence Of The People, They Don't Have To Become Violent In Self-defence.

Look At Almost Any Passage, And You'll Find That A Paragraph Has Five Or Six Metaphors In It. It's Not That The Speaker Is Trying To Be Poetic, It's Just That That's The Way Language Works.

Dominance In An Adaptation To Anarchy And It Serves No Purpose In A Society That Has Undergone A Civilising Process Or In An International System Regulated By Agreements And Norms. Anything That Deflates The Concept Of Dominance Is Likely To Drive Down The Frequency Of Fights Between Individuals And Wars.

Though Knowledge Itself Increasingly Ignores Boundaries Between Fields, Professors Are Apt To Organize Their Pedagogy Around The Methods And History Of Their Academic Subculture Rather Than Some Coherent Topic In The World.

It's The Old Idea That The Process Of Evolution Is Some Push In The Direction Of Greater Complexity--in Particular Greater Intellectual Complexity. In One Twig Of The Tree Of Life, Namely Ours, Having A Big Brain Happened To Have Advantages. But That's Just What Worked For A Particular Species Of Primate 5 To 7 Million Years Ago.

The Brain Is Not A Bag Of Traits. It's Startlingly Complex. There Are Few Or No Single Genes With A Consistent Effect On The Mind.

When Time Permits, I Try To See Interesting People In The Cities I Visit. In Seattle, I Met Paul Allen, The Co-founder Of Microsoft, Who Is Shy In Personality But Flamboyant In His Philanthropy.

We Will Never Have A Perfect World, But It's Not Romantic Or Naive To Work Toward A Better One.

A Perfect World

Of Course, Genes Can't Pull The Levers Of Our Behavior Directly. But They Affect The Wiring And Workings Of The Brain, And The Brain Is The Seat Of Our Drives, Temperaments And Patterns Of Thought.

What Is True For The Emotions May Also Be True For The Intellect. Some Of Our Perplexities May Come From A Mismatch Between The Purposes For Which Our Cognitive Faculties Evolved And The Purposes To Which We Put Them Today.

By Denying People's Sense Of Visual Beauty In Painting And Sculpture , Melody In Music , Meter And Rhyme In Poetry , Plot And Narrative And Character In Fiction , The Elite Arts Wrote Off The Vast Majority Of Their Audience . They Purposely Excluded People Who Approach Art In Part For Pleasure And Edification In Favour Of Social One-upmanship And An Ever-narrowing, In-crowd Elite.

Anything That Makes It Easier To Imagine Trading Places With Someone Else Increases Your Moral Consideration For That Other Person.

Genetically Influenced Behavior Is Not Necessarily Good And Not Necessarily Unchangeable. Explanations Of Bad Behavior That Appeal To Genes Do Not Absolve A Person Any More Than Do Explanations That Appeal To Upbringing.

One Of My Favourite Kinds Of Movie Is The American Picaresque, In Which The Characters Make Their Way Across The Country, Learning About Life Against The Gorgeous Backdrops Of That Vast Land.

If People Are Innately Saddled With Certain Sins And Flaws, Like Selfishness, Prejudice, Sort-sightedness, And Self-deception, Then Political Reform Would Seem To Be A Waste Of Time.

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.

Language Mavens Commonly Confuse Their Own Peeves With A Worsening Of The Language.

Consistent Style Prevents Presentation From Getting In The Way Of Content.

The Stuff Of Life Turned Out To Be Not A Quivering, Glowing, Wondrous Gel But A Contraption Of Tiny Jigs, Springs, Hinges, Rods, Sheets, Magnets, Zippers, And Trapdoors, Assembled By A Data Tape Whose Information Is Copied, Downloaded And Scanned.

Why Are Empirical Questions About How The Mind Works So Weighted Down With Political And Moral And Emotional Baggage?

The European Wars Of Religion Were More Deadly Than The First World War, Proportionally Speaking, And In The Range Of The Second World War In Europe. The Inquisition, The Persecution Of Heretics And Infidels And Witches, They Racked Up Pretty High Death Tolls.

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.

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.

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