Steven Pinker Culture Quotations

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.

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

One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic.

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.

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.

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.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.