Steven Pinker - The Better Angels of our Nature

"Why nature & nurture won't go away" de Steven Pinker

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When Richard Mulcaster referred in 1581 to “that treasure . . . bestowed on them by nature, to be bettered in them by nurture,” he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since. People’s beliefs about the relative importance of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics. Do adolescents engage in violence because of the way their parents treated them early in life? Are people inherently aggressive and selfish, calling for a market economy and a strong police, or could they become peaceable and cooperative, allowing the state to wither and a spontaneous socialism to blossom? Is there a universal aesthetic that allows great art to transcend time and place, or are people’s tastes determined by their era and culture? With so much seemingly at stake in so many fields, it is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke more rancor than just about any issue in the world of ideas.

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Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and author of popular science. Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and language development in children, and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007). Pinker's books have won numerous awards and been New York Times best-sellers.

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