Steven Pinker: The Ancestor Of Evolutionary Psychology

Steven Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954. He is considered the ancestor of evolutionary psychology and is also a prominent scientist, linguist and author.

Pinker has made significant changes in children’s perception and language development. That’s why we want to tell you a little more about Steven Pinker’s life and some of his most interesting books.

The life of Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker was born into a Jewish family. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a school principal and vice-principal. Her sister is a child psychologist and journalist and her brother is a political analyst.

In 1979, Steven Pinker received his doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard University. He then  managed to get a job as a researcher and professor at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

As for his love life, Steven Pinker has been married three times. For the first time, he married psychologist Nancy Etcoff. He then married a cognitive psychologist, Illaven Subbiah. She is currently married to Rebecca Goldstein, a professor of philosophy.

From 1994 to 1999, Pinker served as one of the directors of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center. He is currently working as a professor at Harvard,  still continuing his research and writing. He also participates in many debates and conferences related to science and humanity.

Contribution and publications

At the beginning of his professional career, Steven Pinker focused on researching his own son’s language as well as language development. He wanted to offer support for Chomsky’s theory that language is a formal, universal, and innate mechanism, utterly impractical and unsemantic.

Although he agreed with Chomsky that language is innate, Pinker thought it depended on cognitive processes such as remembering words and learning to use them in grammatical rules.

One of his best books is   “The language Instinct: how the mind creates language”. But there is also another book worth mentioning, called  “Words and rules: the ingredients of language”.

In addition to her interest in linguistics, Steven Pinker studies human behavior. Indeed, one of his most famous books is  “The better Angels of our nature: why violence has declined”. He also focuses a lot on theories related to the human mind. Books related to this topic include “How the mind works” and “The blank state”.

However, that is not all. Pinker has also written many essays on language and mind. The biggest works are  “The rules of language”  and  “So how does the mind work”. They are all fascinating and important articles worth reading.

Steven Pinker: An Influential Man

Pinker’s actions have not gone unnoticed. In 2004, the famous Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.  He was also named one of the 100 most important intellectuals in the world in 2005 by Prospect  and  Foreign Policy magazines.

But, of course, we cannot ignore the fact that Steven Pinker has also received a whopping nine honorary doctorates from several universities. He is also the current director of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Operations Panel and writes articles for well-known magazines such as  The New York Times, Time, and  The Atlantic.

In summary, Steven Pinker studies human mind, language, and behavior. The articles he writes are fascinating and very modern. If he sounds interesting to you, We definitely encourage you to read some of his works!