Steven Pinker Quotes

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?

The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.

I'm the product of 6 million years of evolution? Come on, man. I crawled out of a swamp yesterday.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

Our evolution could have gone in different directions a lot of times. We could have gone extinct at some points. We might not have gotten our big brains, or Neanderthals might have made it while we did not.

As humans become civilized, the survival rate of the lazy, botched and dim-witted grow in inverse proportion to the productive segment since nature can no longer remove them from the species.

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

What people don't realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do - by millions of years of evolution - what we do.

We've almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we've survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.

It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.

Natural selection operates according to immediate cirumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

How man evolved with such an incredible reservoir of talent and such fantastic diversity isn't completely understood... he knows so little and has nothing to measure himself against.

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

The difficulty of looking at a system like natural selection if you have any sort of moral sense yourself, is almost what makes it beautiful.

If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?