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

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

Understanding the Quote: "but in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared..."

This quote by Steven Pinker reflects deeply on the theme of possibility. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Possibility, Genes, Cases, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Steven Pinker interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is celebrated for insightful thoughts on possibility and genes. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Possibility
Genes
Cases
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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.
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Equality
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Racism
Favors
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Accomplishment
Enlightenment
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Principles
Groups
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Goal
Making Love
Working Out What It Would Take To Program Goodness Into A Robot Shows Not Only How Much Machinery It Takes To Be Good But How Slippery The Concept Of Goodness Is To Start With.
Work Out
Robots
Goodness
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.
Thinking
Games
Play
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.
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Want
Might
Something About The Topic Of Consciousness Makes People, Like The White Queen In Through The Looking Glass, Believe Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
Queens
Believe
Impossible Things
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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Book
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Psychology
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Rational
Unconscious
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Race
Culture
Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology
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Disgusting
Intuitive
Aggression, Like Every Other Part Of Human Behavior We Take For Granted, Is A Challenging Engineering Problem!
Engineering
Challenges
Problem
Human Nature Is Complex. Even If We Do Have Inclinations Toward Violence, We Also Have Inclination To Empathy, To Cooperation, To Self-control.
Self
Empathy
Violence
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.
Art
Ignorance
Achievement
Unfortunately, Creative People Are At Their Most Creative When Writing Their Autobiographies.
Writing
People
Creative
My Opinions About Human Nature Are Shared By Many Psychologists, Linguists, And Biologists, Not To Mention Philosophers And Scholars Going Back Centuries.
Opinion
Philosopher
Human Nature
Language Mavens Commonly Confuse Their Own Peeves With A Worsening Of The Language.
Mavens
Language
Peeves
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.
Philosophy
Thinking
Ideas
An Ideology Can Provide A Satisfying Narrative That Explains Chaotic Events And Collective Misfortunes In A Way That Flatters The Virtue And Competence Of Believers, While Being Vague Or Conspiratorial Enough To Withstand Skeptical Scrutiny.
Events
Narrative
Way
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.
Baby
Reading
Different
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.
Government
Self
People
If Anything, Powerpoint, If Used Well, Would Ideally Reflect The Way We Think.
Thinking
Way
Used
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.
Children
Ideas
Achievement
The Problem With The Emotions Is Not That They Are Untamed Forces Or Vestiges Of Our Animal Past; It Is That They Were Designed To Propagate Copies Of The Genes That Built Them Rather Than To Promote Happiness, Wisdom, Or Moral Values.
Animal
Past
Untamed
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.
Gmos
Perception
Brain
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?
Heaven
Fleas
Dry
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.
Children
Intelligent
People
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.
Agency
Space
Research
It Is True That Raids And Battles Killed A Tiny Percentage Of The Numbers That Die In Modern Warfare. But In Tribal Violence, The Clashes Are More Frequent, The Percentage Of Men In The Population Who Fight Is Greater, And The Rates Of Death Per Battle Are Higher.
Fighting
Men
Numbers
Consistent Style Prevents Presentation From Getting In The Way Of Content.
Style
Way
Consistent
We Often Feel That A Clever Aphorism Captures A Truth That Would Require Pages To Defend In Any Other Way.
Clever
Pages
Way
Equity Feminism Is A Moral Doctrine About Equal Treatment That Makes No Commitments Regarding Open Empirical Issues In Psychology Or Biology.
Commitment
Equal Treatment
Issues
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.
Climate
Scarcity
Waste
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?
Ocean
Moon
Tree
Why Are Empirical Questions About How The Mind Works So Weighted Down With Political And Moral And Emotional Baggage?
Emotional
Political
Mind
We Will Never Have A Perfect World, But It's Not Romantic Or Naive To Work Toward A Better One.
Perfect
World
A Perfect World
I Don't Consider Myself To Be That Radical A Thinker.
Radical
Thinker
After Their Return From Babylon, The Practice Of Human Sacrifice Died Out Among The Jews, But Survived As An Ideal In One Of Its Break-away Sects, Which Believed That God Accepted The Torture-sacrifice Of An Innocent Man In Exchange For Not Visiting A Worse Fate On The Rest Of Humanity. The Sect Is Called Christianity.
Fate
Sacrifice
Men
If You Give People Literacy, Bad Ideas Can Be Attacked And Experiments Tried, And Lessons Will Accumulate.
Ideas
Giving
People
Perhaps The Most Extraordinary Popular Delusion About Violence Of The Past Quarter-century Is That It Is Caused By Low Self-esteem. That Theory Has Been Endorsed By Dozens Of Prominent Experts, Has Inspired School Programs Designed To Get Kids To Feel Better About Themselves, And In The Late 1980s Led The California Legislature To Form A Task Force To Promote Self-esteem. Yet Baumeister Has Shown That The Theory Could Not Be More Spectacularly, Hilariously, Achingly Wrong. Violence Is A Problem Not Of Too Little Self-esteem But Of Too Much, Particularly When It Is Unearned.
Self Esteem
School
Kids
We Are Visual Creatures. Visual Things Stay Put, Whereas Sounds Fade.
Sound
Visuals
Creatures
I Would Argue That Nothing Gives Life More Purpose Than The Realization That Every Moment Of Consciousness Is A Precious And Fragile Gift.
Giving
Purpose
Realization
Natural Selection Is Not The Only Process That Changes Organisms Over Time. But Is The Only Process That Seemingly Designs Organisms Over Time.
Design
Evolution
Natural
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.
Wish
Would Be
Needs
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.
Spring
Glowing
Data
The Reason The United States Is Not So Likely To Invade Iran Is Precisely Because Of The Lessons Learned From Iraq. And Conversely, The Iranian Push Towards Nuclear Capability Is Calculated To Deter Invasions Like The Kind Deposing Saddam Husain.
Iran
Iraq
Lesson Learned
If The Cartoon Were Completely Accurate, Though, Life Would Be A Cacophany Of Spoinks.
Cartoon
Would Be
Accurate
The World Has Far Too Much Morality.
World
Too Much
Morality
We Can Shape Events In Each Other's Brains With Exquisite Precision.
Vocabulary
Brain
Events
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.
Dog
Zebras
People
Regardless Of Its Causes, Thoughtlessly Blaming The Present Is A Weakness Which, Even If It Is Never Outlawed, Ought To Be Resisted. Though Commonly Flaunted As A Sign Of Sophistication, It Can Be An Opportunity For One-upmanship And An Excuse For Misanthropy, Especially Against The Young.
Opportunity
Weakness
Causes
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?
Prayer
Believe
Thinking
The Human Moral Sense Can Excuse Any Atrocity In The Minds Of Those Who Commit It, And It Furnishes Them With Motives For Acts Of Violence That Bring Them No Tangible Benefit.
Mind
Religion
Atrocities
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.
Track
Records
Prevention
The Great Appeal Of The Doctrine That The Mind Is A Blank Slate Is The Simple Mathematical Fact That Zero Equals Zero.
Zero
Simple
Mind
Art Works Because It Appeals To Certain Faculties Of The Mind. Music Depends On Details Of The Auditory System, Painting And Sculpture On The Visual System. Poetry And Literature Depend On Language.
Art
Mind
Details
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.
Baby
Home
Animal
If You Aren't Just Brought Up In Your Tribe But Interact With Other People Either Directly Or Vicariously, Through Journalism And Literature, You See What Life Is Like From Other Points Of View And Are Less Likely To Demonize Them Or Dehumanize Others And More Likely To Empathize With Them.
Views
People
Life Is Like
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.
Psychology
Mind
Woven
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.
Country
Character
Land
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.
Believe
Evil
Moral
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. Each Of Us Is Dealt A Unique Hand Of Tastes And Aptitudes, Like Curiosity, Ambition, Empathy, A Thirst For Novelty Or For Security, A Comfort Level With The Social Or The Mechanical Or The Abstract. Some Opportunities We Come Across Click With Our Constitutions And Set Us Along A Path In Life.
Ambition
Unique
Opportunity
The Mind Is A Neural Computer
Mind
Computer
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.
Swiftness
Agility
Shrewdness
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.
Media
People
Events
Morality Comes From A Commitment To Treat Other As We Wish To Be Treated, Which Follows From The Realization That None Of Us Is The Sole Occupant Of The Universe.
Commitment
Wish
Realization
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.
Moving
Men
Empowering
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.
Unique
Thinking
People
The Human Capacity For Compassion Is Not A Reflex That Is Triggered Automatically By The Presence Of Another Living Thing.
Compassion
Capacity
Reflexes
The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs.
Thinking
People
Privilege
Students Do Everything On Laptops These Days, So I Definitely Think Electronic Books Are A Trend That's Going To Expand.
Book
Thinking
Trends
Solving A Problem In A Hundred Years Is, Practically Speaking, The Same As Not Solving It At All.
Years
Problem
Hundred
As Every Student In Philosophy 101 Learns, Nothing Can Force Me To Believe That Anyone Except Me Is Conscious. This Power To Deny That Other People Have Feelings Is Not Just An Academic Exercise But An All-too-common Vice, As We See In The Long History Of Human Cruelty.
Philosophy
Believe
Exercise
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.
Baby
Age
Tourists
Statisticians Tell Us That People Underestimate The Sheer Number Of Coincidences That Are Bound To Happen In A World Governed By Chance.
Numbers
People
World
Violent Movements Attract Thugs And Firebrands Who Enjoy The Mayhem. Violent Tactics Provide A Pretext For Retaliation By The Enemy And Alienate Third Parties Who Might Otherwise Support The Movement.
Party
Thug
Support
The Fact That People Can Forget These Simple Truths When Intellectualizing About Children Shows How Far Modern Doctrines Have Taken Us. They Make It Easy To Think Of Children As Lumps Of Putty To Be Shaped Instead Of Partners In A Human Relationship.
Children
Teaching
Taken
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.
Faith
Believe
People
Gossip Is Certainly One Of The Things That Language Is Useful For, Because It's Always Handy To Know Who Needs A Favor, Who Can Offer A Favor, Who's Available, Who's Under The Protection Of A Jealous Spouse. And Being The First To Get A Piece Of Gossip Is Like Engaging In Insider Trading: You Can Capitalize On An Opportunity Before Anyone Else Can.
Jealous
Opportunity
Gossip
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.
Loneliness
People
Feelings
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.
Ideas
Years
Tree
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.
Democracy
Way
Anarchy
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.
Memories
Psychology
Mind
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.
Running
Dog
Men
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.
Children
Long
Dots
Evolution Is An Indispensable Component Of Any Satisfying Explanation Of Our Psychology.
Psychology
Evolution
Indispensable
[napoleon Deployed] Every Available Resource To Inflict All-out Defeats On [his] Enemies.
Enemy
Defeat
Resources
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.
Mother
Sleep
Boys
We Can Make Fun Of Hockey Fans, But Someone Who Enjoys Homer Is Indulging The Same Kind Of Vicarious Bloodlust.
Fun
Hockey
Bloodlust
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.
War
Europe
Tolls
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.
Hands
Hot
Use
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.
Mean
Self
Practice
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