Steven Pinker Numbers Quotations

I do look for openings where I can overturn popular misconceptions, but unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am neither a contrarian nor a lone heretic. I like to have a significant number of academics watching my back.

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.

Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.

As women are empowered, violence can come down, for a number of reasons. By all measures, men are the more violent gender.

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.