Top 20 Steven Pinker Quotes
Language, evolutionary psychology, sex differences, feminism, cancel culture
This is the latest in my quotes collection series. Check out the full collection here.
Few intellectuals have shaped our understanding of human nature, language, and society as profoundly as Steven Pinker. A cognitive scientist, linguist, and best-selling author, Pinker has spent decades challenging conventional wisdom with sharp reasoning, wit, and an unwavering commitment to truth. He’s one of the great thinkers of our time - and one of my favorite intellectuals.
From the mysteries of language to the decline of violence, from sex differences to the perils of postmodernism, Pinker’s insights cut through the ideological fog with clarity and precision. His words illuminate, provoke, and - on occasion - land him in hot water. Whether you agree with him or not, though, his ideas are always worth considering.
In this post, I’ve gathered together some of Pinker’s most thought-provoking quotes on evolutionary psychology, nature and nurture, feminism, and much, much more. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
On Language
“As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each others’ brains with exquisite precision... Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds.” [Source.]
Language is “an extraordinary gift: the ability to dispatch an infinite number of precisely structured thoughts from head to head by modulating exhaled breath.” [Source.]
“[P]eople know how to talk in more or less the same way that spiders know how to spin webs.” [Source.]
On Evolutionary Psychology
“In rummaging through an antique store, we may find a contraption that is inscrutable until we figure out what it was designed to do. When we realize that it is an olive-pitter, we suddenly understand that the metal ring is designed to hold the olive, and the lever lowers an X-shaped blade through one end, pushing the pit out through the other end. The shapes and arrangements of the springs, hinges, blades, levers, and rings all make sense in a satisfying rush of insight. We even understand why canned olives have an X-shaped incision at one end.” [Source.] [SSW: This is an example of reverse engineering, which evolutionary psychologists use to understand the human mind. The idea is that, as with the olive pitter, when we realize what the human mind is designed to do - namely, to pass on the genes of the body it inhabits - many aspects of mind and behavior suddenly make sense in a satisfying rush of insight.]
“None of this means that people literally strive to replicate their genes. If that’s how the mind worked, men would line up outside sperm banks and women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples. It means only that inherited systems for learning, thinking, and feeling have a design that would have led, on average, to enhanced survival and reproduction in the environment in which our ancestors evolved.” [Source.]
“Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do. Our ancestral environment lacked the institutions that now entice us to nonadaptive choices, such as religious orders, adoption agencies, and pharmaceutical companies, so until very recently there was never a selection pressure to resist the enticements. Had the Pleistocene savanna contained trees bearing birth-control pills, we might have evolved to find them as terrifying as a venomous spider.” [Source.]
“By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake… But I am happy to be voluntarily childless, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. And if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.” [Source.]
On Nature, Nurture, and Ethics
“Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture.” [Source.]
[SSW: The next quote is Pinker’s rebuttal of a common response to Judith Rich Harris’s claim that parents have little impact on their kids.] “‘So you’re saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my children?’ What a question! Yes, of course it matters… First, parents wield enormous power over their children, and their actions can make a big difference to their happiness... It is not OK for parents to beat, humiliate, deprive, or neglect their children, because those are awful things for a big strong person to do to a small helpless one… Second, a parent and a child have a human relationship. No one ever asks, ‘So you’re saying it doesn’t matter how I treat my husband or wife?’ even though no one but a newlywed believes that one can change the personality of one’s spouse. Husbands and wives are nice to each other (or should be) not to pound the other’s personality into a desired shape but to build a deep and satisfying relationship.” [Source.]
On Intelligence
“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64 [or] removing lead paint that lowers a child’s IQ by five points.” [Source.]
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On Sex Differences
“[T]he suggestion that the gender gap [in some STEM fields] may arise, even in part, from differences between the sexes can be fightin’ words. Anyone bringing it up is certain to be accused of ‘wanting to keep women in their place’ or ‘justifying the status quo.’ This makes about as much sense as saying that a scientist who studies why women live longer than men ‘wants old men to die.’” [Source.]
“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group… If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality.” [Source.]
On Feminism
“I want to begin with a confession of my own politics. I am a feminist. I believe that women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and harassed for thousands of years. I believe that the two waves of the feminist movement in the 20th century are among the proudest achievements of our species, and I am proud to have lived through one of them, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences.
“But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex - which I take to be the core of feminism - and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable... Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, ‘I guess sex discrimination wasn’t so bad after all,’ or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.” [Source.]
“Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.” [Source.]
On Postmodernism
“If scientific beliefs are just a particular culture’s mythology, how come we can cure smallpox and get to the moon, and traditional cultures can’t? And if truth is just socially constructed, would you say that climate change is a myth? It’s the same with moral values. If moral values are nothing but cultural customs, would you agree that our disapproval of slavery or racial discrimination or the oppression of women is just a western fancy?” [Source.]
On the World Getting Better
“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least-appreciated development in the history of our species.” [Source.]
“News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, ‘I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out’ - or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.” [Source.]
“Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.” [Source.]
On Cancel Culture
“It’s getting harder and harder to talk about anything controversial online without every single utterance of an opinion immediately being caricatured by opportunistic outrage-mongers.” [Source.]
“When universities are suffocated by cancel culture and other kinds of repression of intellectual freedom, we are disabling our only known means for approaching the truth.” [Source.]
In Other News
My book The Ape That Understood the Universe was mentioned in the March issue of Rolling Stone magazine! When I was in my early twenties and dreaming of being a rock star, I would have been over the moon to learn that my name would one day feature in Rolling Stone. I’m not sure how I would have reacted if I’d known the context, though: that I was mentioned for a book rather than a song or an album - and that it was because the book in question was a favorite of the guy who killed the United Healthcare CEO…
Anyway, here’s the paragraph from the article mentioning TATUTU:
“He [Luigi Mangione] was just such a thoughtful and deeply compassionate person at everything he did,” Wexler told Civil Beat, Hawaii’s nonprofit news organization. They read books like The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve, by Steve Stewart-Williams; Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell; and What’s Our Problem?, by internet writer Tim Urban. But ultimately, says Danny, a friend of Mangione’s and a member of the book club, who asked not to use his last name, “it was just an excuse to get together for sunset.”
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This is the latest post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can access the full collection here.
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“[P]eople know how to talk in more or less the same way that spiders know how to spin webs.”
This claim epitomizes everything that was wrong with the first wave of evolutionary psychology. Spiders know how to spin webs because of an innate reflex. Language learning requires capacities for imitative learning, imagination, and inference that spiders are entirely incapable of. A spider knows how to spin webs even if it never encounters any other spiders, but humans can’t learn language in isolation. The first EPs often seemed to want to attribute all of human behavior to innate reflexes, and that constituted a profound misunderstanding of the way that the human mind works.
I discuss Cecilia Heyes' critique of this mindset here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/what-makes-humans-unique?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false