Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Canada, into a Jewish family that emphasized critical thinking and debate. He earned a BA from McGill University and a PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard University, where his early doctoral work with adviser Stephen Kosslyn focused on visual cognition, demonstrating that mental images represent scenes from specific viewpoints, aligning with David Marr's 'two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch' theory. Pinker shifted to psycholinguistics, promoting computational learning theory for child language acquisition and endorsing Noam Chomsky's innate language faculty, which he argued evolved via natural selection as an adaptation for communication. He taught at Harvard (1982–1985), MIT (as full professor from 1989, director of the Center for Cognitive Science 1985–1994 and McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience 1994–1999), and Stanford before returning to Harvard in 2003 as Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. His popular science writing began with 'The Language Instinct' (1994), blending cognitive science, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Subsequent books like 'How the Mind Works' (1997), 'The Blank Slate' (2002), 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' (2011), 'Enlightenment Now' (2018), and 'Rationality' (2021) explore mind, language, human nature, declining violence, and Enlightenment rationality, often using 'reverse engineering' to trace behaviors to evolutionary origins. Pinker writes for outlets like 'The New York Times' and 'The Atlantic', and his work has earned prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, Royal Institution, and others.