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When It Comes To Explaining Human Thought And Behavior, The Possibility That Heredity Plays Any Role At All Still Has The Power To Shock. To Acknowledge Human Nature, Many Think, Is To Endorse Racism, Sexism, War, Greed, Genocide, Nihilism, Reactionary Politics, And Neglect Of Children And The Disadvantaged. Any Claim That The Mind Has An Innate Organization Strikes People Not As A Hypothesis That Might Be Incorrect But As A Thought It Is Immoral To Think.

-Steven Pinker

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When It Comes To

Steven Pinker

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When It Comes To Explaining Human Thought And Behavior, The Possibility That Heredity Plays Any Role At All Still Has The Power To Shock. To Acknowledge Human Nature, Many Think, Is To Endorse Racism, Sexism, War, Greed, Genocide, Nihilism, Reactionary Politics, And Neglect Of Children And The Disadvantaged. Any Claim That The Mind Has An Innate Organization Strikes People Not As A Hypothesis That Might Be Incorrect But As A Thought It Is Immoral To Think.

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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.

Without Goals The Very Concept Of Intelligence Is Meaningless

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.

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.

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.

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

Beneath The Surface

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

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

Theory Of Evolution

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

As Individual People, Embedded In Our Daily Lives, Of Course We're Interested In What Makes One Person Different From Another. We've Got To Hire One Person And Not Another, Marry One Person And Not Another.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

My Laptop Has Freed Me To Travel.

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?

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Equal Treatment

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

A Perfect World

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disgust Is Intuitive Microbiology

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

People Know There Is A Difference Between What You Do And What You Accept. There Is A Difference Between Me Knowing That People Swear, Me Hearing People Swear And Me Swearing, And Everyone Accepting That This Is Something You Can Do As Much As You Like.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Societies That Empower Women Are Less Violent In Every Way.

Empowering Women

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Fiction Is Empathy Technology.

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

I 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A Successful Learner, . . . Must Be Constrained To Draw Some Conclusions From The Input And Not Others.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 Mind Is A Neural Computer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Personality And Socialization Aren't The Same Thing.

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

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!

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.

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

Evolutionary Psychology Is One Of Four Sciences That Are Bringing Human Nature Back Into The Picture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

The World Has Far Too Much Morality.

Theories Of Art Carry The Seeds Of Their Own Destruction.

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.

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