Is the World Becoming Less Violent? -A Counter-Intuitive Video
Harvard linguist Steven Pinker thinks it is, despite the spread of Islamic extremism and the horrors of Iraq and Darfur. The Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Pinker is known for his research
on how humans acquire and use language, as well as for a series of
best-selling books exploring more general aspects of human mental
activity-The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and The Stuff of Thought- that have stirred the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate into a hornet's nest of heated controversy.
Pinker is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an
"instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection rather
than a by-product of general intelligence. He asserts that not only are
human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language,
but that from birth our minds -- the patterns in which our brain cells
fire -- predispose us each to think and behave differently.
Pinker
argues that humans have evolved to share a facility for language, the
same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren’t born with “blank
slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Is the World Becoming Less Violent?
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