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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.

-Steven Pinker

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Conventions Are Unstated Agreements

Steven Pinker

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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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

I Have Never Been A Fan Of Science Fiction. For Me, Fiction Has To Explore The Combinatorial Possibilities Of People Interacting Under The Constraints Imposed By Our Biology And History. When An Author Is Free To Suspend The Constraints, It's Tennis Without A Net.

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.

Some People Believe That The Nuclear Bomb Should Be Awarded The Nobel Peace Prize, Since It Scared The Major Powers Away From War By Equating It With Doomsday.

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.

The More You Think About And Interact With Other People, The More You Realize That It Is Untenable To Privilege Your Interests Over Theirs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Obviously No Language Is Innate. Take Any Kid From Any Race, Bring Them Up In Any Culture And They Will Learn The Language Equally Quickly. So No Particular Language Is In The Genes. But What Might Be In The Genes Is The Ability To Acquire Language.

Modern Biblical Scholars Have Established That The Bible Is A Wiki. It Was Compiled Over Half A Millennium From Writers With Different Styles, Dialects, Character Names, And Conceptions Of God And Was Subjected To Haphazard Editing That Left It With Many Contradictions, Duplications And Non-sequiturs.

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.

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

If You Give People Literacy, Bad Ideas Can Be Attacked And Experiments Tried, And Lessons Will Accumulate.

I Think That Communism Was A Major Force For Violence For More Than 100 Years, Because It Was Built Into Its Ideology - That Progress Comes Through Class Struggle, Often Violent.

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

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

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.

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.

In The Speech Sound Wave, One Word Runs Into The Next Seamlessly; There Are No Little Silences Between Spoken Words The Way There Are White Spaces Between Written Words. We Simply Hallucinate Word Boundaries When We Reach The End Of A Stretch Of Sound That Matches Some Entry In Our Mental Dictionary.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Maybe Philosophical Problems Are Hard Not Because They Are Divine Or Irreducible Or Meaningless Or Workaday Science, But Because The Mind Of Homo Sapiens Lacks The Cognitive Equipment To Solve Them. We Are Organisms, Not Angels, And Our Minds Are Organs, Not Pipelines To The Truth. Our Minds Evolved By Natural Selection To Solve Problems That Were Life-and-death Matters To Our Ancestors, Not To Commune With Correctness Ot To Answer Any Question We Are Capable Of Asking.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Statisticians Tell Us That People Underestimate The Sheer Number Of Coincidences That Are Bound To Happen In A World Governed By Chance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Equal Treatment

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.

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

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.

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

For All The Tribulations In Our Lives, For All The Troubles That Remain In The World, The Decline Of Violence Is An Accomplishment That We Can Savor - And An Impetus To Cherish The Forces Of Civilization And Enlightenment That Made It Possible.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Of Course The Theory Of Evolution Would Be Vacuous If It Offered A Glib Explanation For Every Inexplicable Act.

Theory Of Evolution

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.

Personality And Socialization Aren't The Same Thing.

I Get Drawn In When I Feel There Is Something Deep And Mysterious Going On Beneath The Surface Of Something.

Beneath The Surface

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trivers, Pursuing His Theory Of The Emotions To Its Logical Conclusion, Notes That In A World Of Walking Lie Detectors The Best Strategy Is To Believe Your Own Lies. You Can’t Leak Your Hidden Intentions If You Don’t Think They Are Your Intentions. According To His Theory Of Self-deception, The Conscious Mind Sometimes Hides The Truth From Itself The Better To Hide It From Others. But The Truth Is Useful, So It Should Be Registered Somewhere In The Mind, Walled Off From The Parts That Interact With Other People.

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

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.

We Are Visual Creatures. Visual Things Stay Put, Whereas Sounds Fade.

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

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

I Think That A Failure Of Statistical Thinking Is The Major Intellectual Shortcoming Of Our Universities, Journalism And Intellectual Culture.

In Many Muslim Countries, Witchcraft Is Not Only On The Books As A Crime, But Is Commonly Prosecuted. In 2009, For Example, Saudi Arabia Convicted A Man For Carrying A Phone Booklet With Characters In An Alphabet From His Native Eritrea, Which The Police Interpreted As Occult Symbols. He Was Lashed Three Hundred Times And Imprisoned For More Than Three Years.

Without Goals The Very Concept Of Intelligence Is Meaningless

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 Enormous Amount Of Scientific Language Is Metaphorical. We Talk About A Genetic Code, Where Code Originally Meant A Cipher; We Talk About The Solar System Model Of The Atom As Though The Atom Were Like A Sun And Moon And Planets.

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

Like The Early Days Of The Internet, The Dawn Of Personal Genomics Promises Benefits And Pitfalls That No One Can Foresee.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?'

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.

Fiction Is Empathy Technology.

Today We Take It For Granted That War Happens In Smaller, Poorer And More Backward Countries.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Tom Hanks, Who Starred In 'the Da Vinci Code,' Turns Out To Be Related To A Number Of The Historic Characters That Feature In 'the Da Vinci Code,' Including William The Conqueror And Shakespeare.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Language Surely Does Affect Our Thoughts, Rather Than Just Labeling Them For The Sake Of Labeling Them. Most Obviously, Language Is The Conduit Through Which People Share Their Thoughts And Intentions And Thereby Acquire The Knowledge, Customs, And Values Of Those Around Them."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Evolutionarily Speaking, There Is Seldom Any Mystery In Why We Seek The Goals We Seek — Why, For Example, People Would Rather Make Love With An Attractive Partner Than Get A Slap On The Belly With A Wet Fish.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Probably Hobbes Got It Right When He Said That A Leviathan, A Third Party With A Monopoly On The Use Of Legitimate Use Of Force In A Territory, Might Be Among The Biggest Violence Reduction Techniques Ever Invented.

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

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.

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

I Try To Jog In Every City I Visit, And I Particularly Enjoy Harbour-front Paths That Let Me Ogle Big Ships, Railroad Bridges And The Ruins Of Factories And Warehouses.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Broadly Speaking, The Southern And Western Desert And Mountain States Will Vote For The Candidate Who Endorses An Aggressive Military, A Role For Religion In Public Life, Laissez-faire Economic Policies, Private Ownership Of Guns And Relaxed Conditions For Using Them, Less Regulation And Taxation, And A Valorization Of The Traditional Family.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dear White Fella When I Am Born I’m Black When I Grow Up I’m Black When I Am Sick I’m Black When I Go Out Ina Sun I’m Black When I Git Cold I’m Black When I Git Scared I’m Black And When I Die I’m Still Black. But You White Fella When You’re Born You’re Pink When You Grow Up You’re White When You Git Sick You’re Green When You Go Out Ina Sun You Go Red When You Git Cold You Go Blue When You Git Scared You’re Yellow And When You Die You’re Grey And You Got The Cheek To Call Me Coloured?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The 1970s, Many Intellectuals Had Become Political Radicals. Marxism Was Correct, Liberalism Was For Wimps, And Marx Had Pronounced That 'the Ruling Ideas Of Each Age Have Ever Been The Ideas Of Its Ruling Class.'

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

The Stirrings Of Morality Emerge Early In Childhood. Toddlers Spontaneously Offer Toys And Help To Others And Try To Comfort People They See In Distress.

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.

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.

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

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?

Aggression, Like Every Other Part Of Human Behavior We Take For Granted, Is A Challenging Engineering Problem!

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.

My Laptop Has Freed Me To Travel.

People Consider The Harms They Inflict To Be Justified And Forgettable, And The Harms They Suffer To Be Unprovoked And Grievous.

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.

'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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

A Perfect World

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

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.

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

Theories Of Art Carry The Seeds Of Their Own Destruction.

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

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.

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

In Our Society, The Best Predictor Of A Man's Wealth Is His Wife's Looks, And The Best Predictor Of A Woman's Looks Is Her Husband's Wealth.

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.

You Wouldn't Believe The Kind Of Hate Mail I Get About My Work On Irregular Verbs.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Mother Teresa Was The Very Embodiment Of Saintliness: White-clad, Sad-eyed, Ascetic And Often Photographed With The Wretched Of The Earth.

We Adults Protect Ourselves With Laws, Police, Workplace Regulations And Social Norms And There Is No Conceivable Reason Why Children Should Be Left More Vulnerable, Other That Laziness Or Callousness In Considering What Life Is Like From Their Point Of View.

Many Artists And Scholars Have Pointed Out That Ultimately Art Depends On Human Nature.

So No, It's Not All In The Genes, But What Isn't In The Genes Isn't In The Family Environment Either. It Can't Be Explained In Terms Of The Overall Personalities Or The Child-rearing Practices Of Parents.

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

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

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

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.

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