Steven Pinker Quotes

Genes don't mean necessarily that you have got a certain strand of gene that makes you particularly acceptable as a public official.

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.

Your genetics is not your destiny.

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.

I wonder whether being a scientist's daughter makes you so conflicted about free will and fate.

Genes are not destiny!

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we're hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.

The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me - my mother's side of the family have awful legs.

I mean you got to thank your parents for giving you the right genes.

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.

The inability to trace DNA to actual diseases has serious consequences. As does the opposite problem - not being able to trace diseases back to DNA.

You can improve your education and even change your environment but what you really ARE was all settled when your parents www born. SELECTED PARENTS WILL HAVE BETTER CHILDREN.

We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.

I know I've got a lot of my mother in me.