Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Steven Pinker

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Steven Pinker

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

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.
Steven Pinker

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.
Steven Pinker

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Steven Pinker

I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.
Steven Pinker

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.
Steven Pinker

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

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

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
Steven Pinker

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.
Steven Pinker

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.
Steven Pinker

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.
Steven Pinker

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.
Steven Pinker

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
Steven Pinker

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
Steven Pinker

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

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Steven Pinker

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?
Steven Pinker