"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?"

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: Steven Pinker

• "Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details ..."
• "As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical ..."
• "But a conception of human nature, and its connections to other fields such as politics ..."
• "But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. "
• "But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, ..."
• "By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we ..."
• "Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the ..."
• "Evolutionary psychology is taking that mindset and applying it to more emotionally charged aspects of ..."
• "For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language ..."
• "I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker. "
• "I think that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among ..."
• "I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts ..."
• "If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and ..."
• "Intellectual life was enormously affected by an understandable revulsion to Nazism, with its pseudoscientific theories ..."
• "It's also a recognition that however much people might vary, they have certain things in ..."
• "Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. "
• "Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. "
• "My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to ..."
• "One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and ..."
• "Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that ..."
• "People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political ..."

• "Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. "
• "Political equality consists of recognizing, as the Constitution says, that people have certain inalienable rights, ..."
• "So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't ..."
• "The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for ..."
• "The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the ..."
• "There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that ..."
• "There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior - namely, ..."
• "Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and ..."
• "We may be seeing a coming together of the humanities and the science of human ..."
• "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and ..."