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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.

-Steven Pinker

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I Think That Metaphor

Steven Pinker

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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.

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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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

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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."

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?

The Task Of Evolutionary Psychology Is Not To Weigh In On Human Nature, A Task Better Left To Others. It Is To Add The Satisfying Kind Of Insight That Only Science Can Provide: To Connect What We Know About Human Nature With The Rest Of Our Knowledge Of How The World Works, And To Explain The Largest Number Of Facts With The Smallest Number Of Assumptions.

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

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Equal Treatment

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

Beneath The Surface

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Personality And Socialization Aren't The Same Thing.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My Laptop Has Freed Me To Travel.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

No Matter How Inured You Get To Atrocities, You're Still Always Stunned And Shocked By How Cruel And Wasteful Homo Sapiens Can Be.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Why Do People Believe That There Are Dangerous Implications Of The Idea That The Mind Is A Product Of The Brain, That The Brain Is Organized In Part By The Genome, And That The Genome Was Shaped By Natural Selection?

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

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

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.

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

Theories Of Art Carry The Seeds Of Their Own Destruction.

Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When People Talk, They Lay Lines On Each Other, Do A Lot Of Role Playing, Sidestep, Shilly-shally And Engage In All Manner Of Vagueness And Innuendo. We Do This And Expect Others To Do It, Yet At The Same Time We Profess To Long For The Plain Truth, For People To Say What They Mean, Simple As That. Such Hypocrisy Is A Human Universal.

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

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.'

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The World Has Far Too Much Morality.

By All Measures Men Are The More Violent Gender.

The Mind Is A Neural Computer

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

One Can Choose To Obsess Over Prescriptive Rules, But They Have No More To Do With Human Language Than The Criteria For Judging Cats At A Cat Show Have To Do With Mammalian Biology.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If You Look In General At People Who Live In Anarchy, They Have Quite High Rates Of Death From Either Homicide Or Warfare Or Both. Anarchy Is One Of The Main Reasons For Violence, And It May Be The Most Important.

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

A Perfect World

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

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.

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.

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

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