Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works Quotes
A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.
A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.
Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.
The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.
We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.
The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt..., " but "If ... then ... else.