Steven Pinker Quotes

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.

There's a constant debate over nature or nurture - they're inseparable.

I have five kids, and people can say 'nature versus nurture,' but it is nature! Nurture has so little to do with it. I have five kids, and there are five totally different people in my house.

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.

It's a funny thing when you know someone and you meet their siblings - you get so much a sense of who they are because when you can recognize similar traits in the family, you understand exactly why they are the way they are.

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

Character, I am sure, lies in the genes.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

I have two kids and they were by no means blank slates. One is exactly like me, one is exactly like my wife.

Genes are not destiny!

Your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger.

My father was always getting excited about something. It's genetically inside me somewhere.

I think the shape of our bodies has as much to do with the shape of our parents as it does with training.

I think we're all a lot more like our parents than we want to admit.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

I don't know if acting is genetic. Maybe it's environmental.

In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.

Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.

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.

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.

I've always kind of gotten my personality from my mom, and whether that's 'star quality' or whatever... a lot of her is in me.

We're all a result of our early years and our nature and nurture.

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

Good heredity and environment are necessary. You cannot compare the child of a savage with the child of a civilized person.