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" By all measures men are the more violent gender. "
Steven Pinker
Measures
Violent
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" Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? "
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" The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living. "
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" Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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? "
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" 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. "
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" With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution. "
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" But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties. "
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" 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. "
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" The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. "
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" Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "
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" 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. "
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" Societies that empower women are less violent in every way. "
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" 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. "
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" Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business. "
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" I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment. "
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" Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease. "
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" I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest. "
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" 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. "
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" I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. "
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" Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. "
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" 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. "
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" Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties. "
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Ancestors
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