Steven Pinker

Posts About

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  The Linguistics of Corrupted Language: Why Orwell Doesn't Need Whorf

  The political corruption of language is often called Orwellian, and indeed Orwell was deeply concerned with it, both his essay “Politics and the English Language”, and the role of Newspeak in his novel 1984. He has in mind a bidirectional process: The decline of a language must ultimately have political and . . .

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  Why Do New Atheists Hate Group Selection?

  Richard Dawkins’ best-known scientific achievement is popularizing the theory of gene-level selection in his book The Selfish Gene. Gene-level selection stands apart from both traditional individual-level selection and group-level selection as an explanation for human cooperation. Steven Pinker, similarly, wrote a long article on the “false allure” of group selection . . .

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  Why I Don't Worry about Nuclear War

  If you ask the man on the street what's the biggest threat to the continued existence of human civilization, he'll probably say global nuclear war. And yet, even as someone who worries a lot about threats to civilization, I don't spend much time thinking about nuclear war. Global nuclear war is . . .