Canadian - Scientist | September 18, 1954 -
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.
Steven Pinker
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You don't like to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin of life or the fate of the planet?
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I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
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All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
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As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.
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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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Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
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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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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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You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.
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The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.
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I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
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