Summary: Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves. He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought). Transcript and links: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/steven-pinker-language-instinct-evolutionary-psychology-darwin-chomsky-linguistics-b792d7cd2a05 Follow Steven Pinker: https://twitter.com/sapinker Please help others find the podcast: subscribe, share, star and review! Follow us on social: FB: www.facebook.com/cowenconvos Twitter: twitter.com/cowenconvos
