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“... these days. That, however, is what Words and Rules is about and, as if to sweep any doubts away, Steven Pinker assures us of the subject’s importance: the study of the past tense is ‘the only case I know in which two great systems of Western thought may be tested and compared . . . like ordinary scientific hypotheses’. As for his own theory of ...”

“... a brave and independent thinker who never got swept up in the various intrigues and manias, and Steven Pinker, one of Chomsky’s star colleagues but also one who has staunchly resisted the local strains of contagious hysteria, have each written an accessible, entertaining, authoritative introduction to the modern science of language. Both books ...”

“... are almost exactly reversed as medical terms, economic conditions and common sensibilities alter. Steven Pinker, who had a hand in the Science paper, is delighted about it all. ‘There is so much ignorance. We’ve had to speculate what might have happened to the language.’ The Google database is certainly a tool, and will, I imagine, become a better ...”

“... scoff at such claims. The brain is not ‘a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience’, Steven Pinker has insisted. Its wiring may change a bit when we learn a new fact or skill, but its basic cognitive architecture remains the same. And where is the evidence that using the internet can ‘massively remodel’ the brain? The only germane study ...”

“... was skint). The writer Malcolm Gladwell went on the jet, but says he had no idea who Epstein was. Steven Hoffenberg, who cheated investors out of $460 million, claims that Epstein was not just a friend but a co-conspirator in his own crimes. Nobody has ever seen a reliable list of Epstein’s financial clients. The publication of Epstein’s contacts list ...”

“... friends you shall know them. Among those most delighted by this episode have been Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch and Douglas Murray: weirdly few non-white non-men. I recommend that, on their next visit to Portland, these people spend some time in a dog park or ...”

“... psychology that has become popular in recent years: that of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steven Pinker and their acolytes, who argue that we still have biologically fixed Stone Age minds constituted by mental models evolved to solve problems of Pleistocene environments, principally those of the African savanna of three million years ago. Smail ...”

“... the art. They differ a bit in their intended audience; Plotkin’s is more or less a text, while Pinker hopes for a lay readership. Pinker covers much more ground but he takes an ungainly six hundred pages to do it, compared to Plotkin’s svelte volume. Both authors are unusually good at exposition, ...”

“... and justified. These are tasks that many rationalists, in the ‘new atheist’ tradition of Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, have been happy to pursue. Arguing as much with (what they perceive as) the relativism of the left as with the dogmatism of the right, these bombastic defenders of Western reason exhibit a spirit of hostility towards anyone ...”

“... several others on sunspots; Leibniz and Newton on the calculus; Priestley and Scheele on oxygen; Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion ...”

“... of Dennett’s, and many other current sources. You can even read it in the New York Times, where Steven Pinker has recently urged teaching it to innocent children in grade school. O, brave new world! It’s a dubious brew of neo-Darwinism and blatant anthropomorphism, and it indulges talk of ‘selfish’ genes and redwood trees with ‘points of ...”

“... Churchland claims. ‘Our moral nature is what it is because our brains are as they are.’ Steven Pinker writes that the ‘human moral sense turns out to be an organ … with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.’ Thus Daniel Dennett feels able to claim that Darwinism is a ‘universal acid’ that ...”

“... cunningly, PageRank), one of Google’s founders and now once more its CEO; and his model, as Steven Levy explains in In the Plex, was the system of scholarly citation, by which journal articles and books are considered important if they are referred to by other important journal articles and books. Levy is big on origins. Not everyone will think much of ...”

“... for inconsistency. Harvard is now a place, its own Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Steven Pinker, remarked, ‘where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offence but calling for another Holocaust depends on context’. Others contrasted what they took to be a lack of consideration given by Harvard’s leadership to Jews with the position ...”

“... Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly powerful ways of imaging activity in the brain. But he is first of all a biologist. His guiding principle is that we cannot understand the human brain unless we understand how it came into being ...”