Steven Pinker

Why Our Longing to Matter Drives and Divides Us | Amanpour and Company youtu.be/LTkNwAFtb9w?si… via @YouTube

Background: The political left has hoped and dreamed that Lamarckism is true for more than a century, despite its manifest absurdity (how can a macroscopic effect on the body be reverse-coded into genetic instructions and passed into eggs and sperm? Why aren’t Jewish boys born pre-circumcised)? Lamarck’s principle of “Felt need” is just as mystical – how does needing to see conjure an eye into being? George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian socialist, wrote: “"Darwinism seems simple because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration." (One may contrast this with Darwin’s own ending to the Origin, in which he eloquently wrote, “There is grandeur in this view of life….”) And of course the famines in Soviet Russia arose from Lysenko making Lamarckism official state doctrine. Yet the academic left won’t give up, grasping at epigenetic straws (very different) as if they vindicated Jean-Baptiste. That task seems to have fallen to Riskin, who, with Marcus Feldman, has inherited the role of anti-genetics and anti-evolution policeman for the New York Review of Books now that Stephen Jay Gould and Jerry’s mentor Dick Lewontin are no longer with us.

"More misguided critique of the modern theory of evolution"—Jerry Coyne, as always, brings clarity to biological commentary in his blog Why Evolution Is True. whyevolutionistrue.com/2026/07/06/mor…

Bucket list conversation alert 🚨 Rebecca Goldstein & I discussed: ⇨ why every human being is haunted by the need to matter ⇨ the four types of people and how each one tries to satisfy that longing ⇨ why Ludwig Boltzmann's suicid3 is a thermodynamic story ⇨ how depression maps onto entropy ⇨ whether AI can ever have a mattering instinct, and ⇨ why heroic strivers are the most threatened by artificial intelligence. youtu.be/6fubsTGbSs8?su…

It seems trite to proclaim that every person matters--in the moral sense, which is generally taken to mean that, to the extent that any of us matter, we all matter to that same exact degree. But how do you prove it? My most recent Substack: rebeccanewbergergoldstein.substack.com/p/chew-on-that…

This is the best conversation I've had in a long time! Why do so many people feel so lost today? The Mattering Instinct's @platobooktour and I discuss the psychology of freedom on new @reason Intervew youtube.com/watch?v=a5eHmG…

New #ScalingTheory episode out now, with @sapinker. Here, Steven weighs up effective altruism. ▶️ youtube.com/watch?v=ijNjY7… 🎧 open.spotify.com/episode/36hXGo… 🍎 podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/sca…

The Woman Iran Could Not Break open.substack.com/pub/middleeast…

Recently Brian Boutwell and I edited a special issue of the journal Developmental Review updating Harris's views on heritability, peer influence, gene-environment interactions, and chance on the development of personality. sciencedirect.com/special-issue/…

It's depressing that 28 years after Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption, psychologists are conducting, and journalists credulously reporting, useless correlational studies of people's decades-old memories of childhood abuse & their adult relationships, presented as evidence for causality. No controls for (among other things) more neurotic adults spinning childhood memories as traumatic; abusive parents passing on genes for cantankerousness to their kids; more obstreperous children growing into more obstreperous adults. | "Childhood Trauma Echoes Through Romantic Relationships" nautil.us/childhood-trau…

"The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific." Chelsea Follett @chellivia describes The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days” humanprogress.org/the-grim-truth… via @HumanProgress

University ethical Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) have become weapons that ideologues can use to shut up people whose opinions they don’t like, and red-tape dispensers which bog down research while failing to protect, and sometimes harming, patients and research subjects. | Reforming University Ethics Boards open.substack.com/pub/erickaufma…

Humans have always been peripatetic and lubricious, so we are all immigrants and we are all mongrels. | My colleague David Reich (who would not put it that way) on migration, mixed ancestries, and ancient DNA current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/david-…

Why Our Longing to Matter Drives and Divides Us | Amanpour and Company youtu.be/LTkNwAFtb9w?si… via @YouTube

The Myth of American Decline open.substack.com/pub/humanprogr…

Including homicides: U.S. murder rate approaches a record low : NPR npr.org/2026/06/30/nx-…

Provisional Data: U.S. Death Rate Fell to a Record Low in 2025 blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2026/07/0…

"Nobody wants to see headlines about incremental progress. That's the bias that gets us in trouble." open.substack.com/pub/edgyoptimi…

Public Comment on the Office of Management and Budget Proposed Regulation on Federal Financial Assistance by USC Professor of Chemistry Anna Krylov. open.substack.com/pub/hxstem/p/p…

"Reform [in science funding] should not consist merely of reversing the policies of previous administrations. Instead, [it should be] a renewed commitment to the principles that historically underpinned American scientific success: merit-based peer review, intellectual pluralism, and transparency." New Article Warns of “Whiplash” in U.S. Science Policy as OMB Proposes Unprecedented Control over Federal Research Funding open.substack.com/pub/hxstem/p/n…

Poetry in America - Full episodes of Seasons 1-4 of the PBS Series now available to stream on Youtube. @PoetryinAmerica" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@PoetryinAmeri…