The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction.
I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.
A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
Disgust is intuitive microbiology
The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values.
[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.
... people notice differences and expect every difference in form to convey some difference in meaning.
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
'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.
Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
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