Best of Steven Pinker Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 1

my guest today on the science studio is Steven Pinker who's the Johnston family professor at Harvard University who was MIT before that he's a well known cognitive scientist who works in language and he's perhaps best known for a trilogy of books first of all the language instinct second how the mind works and the third one which is the reason he's here today is the stuff of thought Steve welcome thank you it doesn't hurt to what extent in dealing with these sorts of issues that you're having come from Jewish background color the way you think well I think the the I didn't have a my religious background was mostly cultural I'm not theological I don't think the word God was ever mentioned in my household I went to Sunday school and there wasn't a whole lot of God talk there it was there's a lot of arguing and Jews are famous for being opinionated co-expression 10 Jews 11 opinions and so that tradition perhaps handed down from Talmudic disputation was very much part of my Jewish education maybe it's part of my personality my the and and I'm very happy to acknowledge the influence of Jewish culture on my own thinking and personality but for me it is it's a cultural endowment and gift it's something that I have a great deal of affection for I think in the way that say an italian-american would have great affection for all everything Italian it is certainly not theological and nor is it that is I'm I'm an atheist so I the advantage of being Jewish is that there's it's kind of a don't-ask-don't-tell kind of religion where as long as you do the right things no one cares that much what you think and of course I don't do them either in terms of being religiously observant but I do mind the cultural tradition for the humor the language the tradition of intellectual dispute ation I also don't I used to think and this was very much part of my background that that Judaism was the original source of morality in the Western tradition that the Jews gave morality to the world in the form of the Torah and the Ten Commandments and so on and I don't believe that anymore I mean I don't think there's anything I don't think we did you have been immoral but I think that the source of morality was goes back to be to the Greeks and was really developed in the Enlightenment and that the Bible is a pretty rotten guide to to how we should treat each other even today a majority of our compatriots don't believe in an idea that you and I would probably agree is one of the most important ideas in the history of human thought namely Darwin's theory of natural selection and one of the grounds for skepticism is the claim that you hear over and over again that no one has ever discovered a transitional fossil which ironically is nowhere more false than the case of homo sapiens were not only are there many transitional fossils but before any of them had been found Darwin correctly predicted that they would be found in Africa why that's where the chimps live and the chimps are morphologically the closest extant species to humans displaying both the confirmation of the more general idea of evolution namely that there were gradual transitions therefore you do predict if you're lucky to find a transitional form but even more interestingly the fact that Darwin's own theory did have at the time enormous predictive power which is why he continues to be relevant he didn't just put together the information around at the time but in the best tradition of science made empirical predictions that could be falsified the vast majority of which had not been falsified such as where where you'd find the first transitional fossils the question of Darwinism as a as a term is interesting both linguistically in the sense that even though I think there's some unfortunate aspects to it as a linguist I know this it's a losing battle to debate it because once a name sticks no amount of rational argument will lead to a replacement name if that's what everyone knows the theory by the reason that scientists are a bit skittish about the term Darwinism is that it goes against the grain of science which is that it isn't the guy that matters it's the idea and another criticism of evolutionary theory by creationists is that the gods of Moses and Jesus have been replaced by secularists but with the gods of Darwin Marx and Freud you often hear that and so I think some scientists bridle at the idea that we have our God who's placing a secular saint and that to identify an idea with a particular person this is the point that it's the idea of it counts nonetheless I agree with you that that Darwin was an extra and continues to be an extraordinary scientist that both of us go back to his writings to get insights that continue to be relevant today that he isn't just of historical interest and this is certainly true in psychology where there are a number of topics for me most notably in the expression of emotions in animals and men where no one since Darwin has analyzed the phenomena in as much depth as he did mm-hmm maybe I'll get my favorite example because this is I think after his prediction that the transitional human fossils would be found in Africa this is my favorite bit of Darwinian ax and this is he in the expression of the emotions he introduced a principle of what he called antithesis that is that when an animal displays a particular intention with a particular conformation of muscles and joint postures when it is in the opposite emotional state it will display the opposite configuration or the opposite posture and so he note he used this to explain why dogs wag their tails that when a dog is ready to attack it will lean forward muscles rigid tail pointed straight behind in preparation to leap what does the dog do when it's in a friendly frame of mind it crouches down has its head up and its tail is limply wagging now you ask what's the equivalent in the human case well when a human assumes an aggressive or posture you have the shoulder squared the brow lowered the head facing forward the arms pronated and the fists clenched now what happens when you have the joint for joint muscle for muscle opposite of that well you've got the head to the side the brows raised the shoulders hunched the arms supinated and the hands open the evolution of the shrugging now no one since then has has done better at explaining why we shrug and again it makes the prediction that the shrug should not just be a convention of our particular reversal culture but at least but found in other cultures and he he's amazingly eclectic in terms of his empirical methods but anytime a missionary or an explorer or sailor was going to go overseas he gave them a little questionnaire to fill out whenever you meet a as he put it on a wild Malay or a Negro or I can do it or an Eskimo could you write down all of these features of what they do when they're happy what they do in their angry and so on and got back years later a set of Diaries which allowed him to document the universality of many facial and bodily postures an empirical body of research that basically ley ignored for another century until Paul Ekman revived the study of universals of expression but anyway that's just my favorite example of the continuing relevance of Darwin as a scientist but in a process that's been called the humanitarian revolution these brutal sadistic forms of corporal punishment were abolished they were abolished within a fairly narrow window centered in the second half of the 18th century here we have a timeline from 1650 to 1850 showing a number of major states of the era that abolished cruel physical punishments including the United States with its famous prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the 8th amendment to the Constitution also abolish during this period was the profit application of the death penalty for non-lethal crimes 18th century England had 222 capital offences on the books including poaching counterfeiting robbing a rabbit warren being in the company of gypsies and strong evidence of malice in a child 7 to 14 years of age the death penalty was not just on the law in the law books but was exuberantly applied Samuel Johnson writes of a seven-year-old girl who was hanged for stealing a petticoat by 1861 the number of capital crimes had been reduced to four likewise in the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries the death penalty was prescribed and used for theft sodomy besty ality adultery witchcraft concealing birth slave revolt and counterfeiting here we have a graph that extends from 1650 to the year 2000 showing the percentage of American executions for crimes other than murder in the colonial and early federal period a majority of the executions were for non-lethal crimes in recent years the only crime other than murder that has been punished by death is conspiracy to commit murder the death penalty itself of course has been abolished throughout the Western world except in the United States this timeline shows that just about every European country has abolished capital punishment most of the abolitionists took have taken place in the last 60 years or so but well before that European countries lost their taste for executing people the blue line shows the number of European countries that actually execute people whether or not they have capital punishment on the books and you can see that there's been a steady erosion of the application of the death penalty before it was it was stricken from the law books now the United States is famously an outlier or I should say that 34 of the 50 states are outliers because 16 have abolished it a number that has increased by five in just the last decade but even in the United States the death penalty is a shadow of its former self here we have a graph from 16:25 - mm showing the number of American executions per capita the graph shows that the execution rate has plunged today for all its notoriety the death penalty is applied approximately 45 times a year in a country that has almost 17,000 homicides also abolished during the humanitarian revolution were witch hunts religious persecutions such as burning heretics at the stake dueling blood sports debtors prisons and perhaps most famously slavery slavery used to be legal everywhere on earth as you can see in the number of states that abolished slavery in 1600 but in a process that began in the second half of the 18th century it was targeted for elimination in country after country a process that reached its completion in 1980 when the last spot on earth Mauritania finally abolished slavery even so for the first time in history slavery is now illegal everywhere on earth I think that uh using the word God or or the attitude of faith toward that what you don't know is is a cop-out it's a way of slapping a label onto something rather than trying to understand it or since we may not not understand everything just say there's some things we don't understand to invent stories that sound as if they were true or could be true to pretend that they're true just so that we can have a story I think is is unsatisfying and it could even be immoral because it could lead you to mistaken policies to getting in the way of your best understanding of how the world works to doing things that could that lead to more harm than good the concrete example would be treating cancer with some cockamamy herbal or homeopathic formula instead of the best medicine that we have or justifying invasions and and sacrifices on the grounds of appeasing some God or carrying out some divine mandate I mean there's nothing but mischief that can come from inventing stories for that which we don't understand there's nothing wrong with saying there's some things we don't understand yeah there is a lot to say about political language one of them is that the logic of plausible deniability and mutual knowledge and relationship negotiation that drives us to indirect speech in ordinary conversation like passing the salt is even more magnified in the political arena because anything concrete that a politician says in terms of policy is bound to offend some sector of the population and so the art of a lot of political rhetoric is to say things that are vague enough that there is plausible deniability in terms of some position that will tick off a constituency but that can be interpreted by those who are receptive in a way that's favorable to their interests and this process pushes politicians to vaguer and vaguer and windier and windier and emptier and emptier rhetoric like say what is your platform for running the country change well yeah well yes but what kind of change well everyone it's vague enough that everyone can read into it the kind of change they favor without there being any change in the things that that are aspects of the status quo that they're happy with now that's of course extremely hypocritical but on the other hand it's we the audience who are equally hypocritical because what happens when a politician actually comes out and says something content full or substantive there's a firestorm there the politician will have committed what we all know as a gaffe now of course the best definition of a gaffe is from Michael Kinsley namely a gaffe is when a politician says something that's true and the I think the broadcast media and men many of the print media are guilty of making this worse because their idea of political coverage when it's not the horse race it's um is is just a gaffe spotting they presidential debates I think white egregiously are covered by the media simply in terms of waiting for one or the other to commit a gaffe and which then gets endlessly discussed and to the extent that we allow ourselves to be swayed by so-called gaffes by the one soundbite yeah well when people lose their jobs they turn to guns and religion we're a nation of whiners and they get the lipstick on a pig and so on we're like it or not forcing the politicians to give us empty rhetoric so that's that's one dimension another one of course is competitive framing whether a tax increase is pinning our bills and and and not beggaring our grandchildren or whether it is funneling more money to pork barrel projects and taking the dollars that that you earned and giving them and having the government confiscate them so there's that and just about any issue can be framed in these different ways and that's what we call spin doctoring that is finding the most compromising or unsavory way in which an evangelist ition can be framed and claiming that that's your opponent's position and then there's also connotation of the a euphemism and dysphemism the same phenomenon that goes into swearing namely that words in addition to having their literal meaning can evoke an immediate emotional response is put to effect often in political rhetoric such as my opponent is a liberal which you has the can have the effect if skillfully applied of making certain words like liberal basically the equivalent of swearwords and this is obviously specific to a time in place you go across the border to Canada and there's a there's a Liberal Party and that people are proud to say I'm a liberal but you can't say that in American politics because of a use of whatever psychological process and I don't think it's well understood that allows words to gain or lose strong emotional colorings and terrorism and many other words can kind of suck up emotional colorings together with their literal meaning and that's part of political rhetoric militant religions like other militant ideologies that that denigrate the value of and end the life of an individual man woman or child I think are among the most pernicious destructive forces and the general secularization of the world since the time of the Enlightenment I believe is one of the forces that has helped reduce violence in many parts of the world institutionalized forms of violence like the Inquisition the Crusades the Wars of Religion that some of the remaining threats do come from idea religious ideologies that still glorify the the Creed the faith the religion over the lives on earth of individual men women and children yes most people have the stereotype that science is about inventing gadgets curing diseases monitoring the environment a narrow utilitarian focus on the material world on stuff and bodies but science is much broader than that it's really our best attempt to understand world around us including the world of other people including the world of politics and history and economics I see science as first of all be committed to the idea that if the world is intelligible there are explanations behind phenomena and also that the search for those explanations is hard that we are the human brain by itself is ill-equipped to figure out how the world works we were brains evolved to solve concrete problems like finding out which plants are safe to eat or how best it trap an animal they're not so good left to their own devices at figuring out not only how the material world works were liking from but why Wars start and stop what drives the crime rate up up and down what's good or bad for the economy or the environment or education but that science can be applied to these problems and often it delivers surprises that when you explicitly acknowledge that our own common sense is likely to be a source of error that there are enough psychologists and characterized number of bugs in our cognitive software by advising workarounds for those bugs which I is what I see sciences being the business of doing you cannot be surprised at the state of the world and surprised at what we can do to move the state of the world in directions that we like

Channel: Agatan Foundation

Views: 165,367

Rating: 4.8621907 out of 5

Keywords: Steven Pinker (Author), Science (TV Genre), Richard Dawkins (Academic), Best, Moments, Darwin, of, arguments, clever, comebacks, part, Delivery, Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Religion, Philosophy, argument, funny, Science, great, nice, cool, Good, comeback, answer, anti-theist, anti, theist, intelligent, bright, smart, church, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, new, morality, god, free will, extremism, amazing, scientist, Scientist (Profession), agatan, one, Psychology (Field Of Study)

Id: YH4tf-w-RKA

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2015