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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. "

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" Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. "

Steven Pinker

Internet

Promises

" I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. "

" Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. "

" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "

" 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. "

" We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. "

" Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. "

" But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "

" One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. "

" If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs. "

" 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. "

" We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. "

" Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. "

" 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. "

Steven Pinker

Politics

Police

" It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind. "

" There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. "