Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker (born September 18 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a psychologist at Harvard University and a writer of popular science books. He was a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Experimental Psychology) from Harvard University in 1979.
Pinker has written about language and cognitive science at every level, from technical papers to approachable popular science. He is most noted for his work on how children acquire language and for his furthering of Noam Chomsky's work on language as a basic human instinct.
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Pinker is not alone in seeing a complete denial of human nature in the academic left, or in arguing that this is inaccurate and harmful. Ehrenreich and McIntosh, for example, suggest that postmodernism is the "new creationism", the newest threat to biology's explanations in terms of evolution. Pinker was among the founders of evolutionary psychology along with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, and would seem to share their commitment to using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection as a basis for understanding human behaviour. Books by Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate
