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146-746: Atran was born in New York City in 1952. While a student, he became assistant to anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History . He received his BA from Columbia College , MA from Johns Hopkins University , and PhD in anthropology from Columbia University . Atran has taught at Cambridge University , Hebrew University in Jerusalem , the École pratique des hautes études and École polytechnique in Paris, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He

292-622: A PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later, Stanford University . From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT , was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking

438-533: A spandrel – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. In How the Mind Works , Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant 's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect

584-538: A 2019 story in Current Affairs , proprietor Nathan Robinson criticised Pinker, saying that he misrepresents his critics' arguments against his work. In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out

730-402: A Daughter's Eye , Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual . In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life. She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with

876-602: A Western context. Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women. In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence . Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with

1022-562: A child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology . He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that

1168-512: A close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict . However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and women's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa , they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, she later burned their correspondence on a beach. Between 1925 and 1926, she was in Samoa from where on

1314-564: A considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer . In the 1967 musical Hair , her name is given to a transvestite "tourist" disturbing the show with the song "My Conviction." In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame . Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist , psycholinguist , popular science author , and public intellectual . He

1460-414: A crusade, a calling, a vision quest, or a jihad. [Atran writes that religion] may also turn a commitment to a cause into a sacred value — a good that may not be traded off against something else, including life itself. The commitment can be further stoked by the thirst for revenge, which in the case of militant Islamism takes the form of vengeance for the harm and humiliation suffered by any Muslim anywhere on

1606-500: A debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor of the proposition that the gender difference in representation in elite universities was "explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias". In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on

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1752-509: A different cultural pattern. In brief, her comparative study revealed a full range of contrasting gender roles: Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975 and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s), Chambri men dominated the women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. In later years, there has been

1898-813: A diligent search for societies in which women dominate men or for signs of such past societies, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974). Jessie Bernard criticised Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead's descriptions were subjective. Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast,

2044-702: A family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University , then transferred to Barnard College . Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University , and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa . In 1926, she joined

2190-1022: A groundbreaking paper with Angel Gomez, Lucia Lopez-Rodriguez, Hammad Sheikh, Jeremy Ginges, Lydia Wilson, Hoshang Waziri, Alexandra Vazquez, and Richard Davis. Titled 'The Devoted Actor's Will to Fight and the Spiritual Dimension of Human Conflict', the piece focuses on the spiritual dimensions of conflict based upon field work in Iraq with combatants and lab studies, assessing non-utilitarian dimensions of conflict. Atran and his team have validated aspects of these behavioral findings in neuroimaging studies of radicalized individuals in Europe, including greater willingness to fight and die for sacred versus non-sacred values that involves inhibition of deliberative reasoning in favor of rapid, duty-bound responses. Atran conducts ongoing research in Guatemala, Mexico, and

2336-559: A lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015. In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now , Pinker posited that Enlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right. In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha said that Enlightenment philosophy had immoral consequences such as inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide, and that Pinker downplayed them. Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived

2482-584: A middle-class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community. His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father, Harry, worked in real estate and was a lawyer. His mother, Roslyn, was originally a homemaker, but later became a guidance counsellor and a high-school vice-principal. In an interview, Pinker described his mother as "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything". His brother, Robert, worked for

2628-448: A milestone in the development of cognitive science and its integration into the wider scientific community. Atran has experimented on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature , on the evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion , and on the limits of rationality in understanding and managing deep-seated cultural and political conflict. His work has been widely published internationally in

2774-407: A mind adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result. Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be

2920-533: A neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play." Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are genetically adaptive (Pinker

3066-884: A one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara , in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has been serving as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities , a private college in London. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007,

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3212-431: A personal friend of Pinker's who was Jeffrey Epstein 's defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped. In 2019, Pinker stated that he

3358-452: A positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is ' not even wrong '." On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on

3504-532: A purely symbolic declaration by the enemy in which it compromised on one of its sacred values." In the deal presented to Israeli settlers, the Palestinians "would give up any claims to their right of return" or "would be required to recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel"; in that presented to the Palestinians, Israel "would recognize the historic and legitimate right of

3650-443: A series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language . Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where

3796-708: A signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate which argued that discussion of political issues was being silenced by a widespread "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and a tendency to dissolve complex issues into a binding moral certainty." Pinker has sharply criticized social conservatives , such as former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics Leon Kass , for opposing stem cell research , arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives. Pinker

3942-543: A specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr 's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations. In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as

4088-578: A spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building. Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced" by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg , George Miller , Roger Brown , Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman . Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book Words and Things (1958)

4234-734: A very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics. While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, some non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach follow Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker , biologist Richard Dawkins , evolutionary psychologist David Buss , science writer Matt Ridley , classicist Mary Lefkowitz . In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger , Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of

4380-463: A way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire

4526-404: A year for a hundred years, or a guarantee that the people would live in peace and prosperity. With these sweeteners on the table, the nonabsolutists, as expected, softened their opposition a bit. But the absolutists, forced to contemplate a taboo tradeoff, were even more disgusted, angry, and prepared to resort to violence." But for the third group, the proposed two-state solution was "augmented with

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4672-601: Is French intellectualism at its most profound — and most useful. Here’s a telling anecdote: When Charlie Chaplin and the French filmmaker René Clair watched ' Triumph of the Will ' (1935), Leni Riefenstahl ’s visual paean to National Socialism, 'Chaplin laughed but Clair was terror-stricken, fearing that, if it were shown more widely, all might be lost in the West'. The Chronicle of Higher Education accompanied Atran to frontlines in

4818-463: Is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion , consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate . According to West, the doctrine of tabula rasa remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy" a decade after

4964-521: Is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been questioned in Jeffrey Elman 's Rethinking Innateness : A Connectionist Perspective on Development , which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds ,

5110-532: Is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct." In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of The Language Instinct , Pinker cited Why Our Children Can't Read by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted: One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in The Language Instinct :

5256-481: Is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind . Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University . He specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics , and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language, the neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Other experimental topics he works on are

5402-457: Is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism ). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate around The Blank Slate , Pinker called Thomas Sowell 's book A Conflict of Visions "wonderful", and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and

5548-411: Is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide . Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being

5694-473: Is concerned, music is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll , experts in music cognition , who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music , Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection , social bonding, and cognitive development ; he questions

5840-725: Is credited with the pluralization of the term " semiotics ". In 1948 Mead was quoted in News Chronicle as supporting the deployment of Iban mercenaries to the Malayan Emergency , arguing that using Ibans (Dyaks) who enjoyed headhunting was no worse than deploying white troops who had been taught that killing was wrong. In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston , author Gail Sheehy , John Langston Gwaltney , Roger Sandall , filmmaker Timothy Asch , and anthropologist Susan C. Scrimshaw , who later received

5986-673: Is emeritus research director in anthropology at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and member of the Jean Nicod Institute at the École normale supérieure . He is also research professor of public policy and psychology at the University of Michigan , founding fellow of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University , and cofounder of ARTIS International . He

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6132-401: Is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead. In 1990 Pinker, with Paul Bloom , published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection . The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with

6278-686: Is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard . On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.' Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls , in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created

6424-459: Is more likely that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them, the "better angels of our nature". He outlines several "major historical declines of violence" that all have their own social/cultural/economic causes. Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling. This and other aspects drew criticism, including

6570-511: Is near-universal admiration, bordering on awe, for how Atran is able to collect data in the midst of a violent conflict." A series of experimental studies directed by Atran and social psychologist Ángel Gómez performed with captured ISIS fighters, fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party ( PKK ), Peshmerga , Iraq Army and Arab Sunni Militia in Iraq, as well as with thousands of ordinary European citizens, have further elaborated

6716-585: Is not. Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters. In The Better Angels of Our Nature , published in 2011, Pinker argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human nature has changed. In his view, it

6862-475: Is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages . Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as

7008-599: Is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, especially in the large island of New Guinea . Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin , West Sepik Province , a more sparsely-populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mount Hagen . They were closer to those described by Mead. Mead stated that

7154-481: Is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein . He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau. Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a "cultural Jew". Pinker is an avid cyclist . Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from

7300-452: Is the opportunity to join a happy band of brothers. Terrorist cells often begin as gangs of underemployed single young men who come together in cafes, dorms, soccer clubs, barbershops, or Internet chat rooms and suddenly find meaning in their lives by a commitment to the new platoon.... Commitment to the group is intensified by religion, not just the literal promise of paradise but the feeling of spiritual awe that comes from submerging oneself in

7446-600: The American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution . She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within

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7592-422: The American Museum of Natural History , New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement, she married her first husband (1923–1928), Luther Cressman , an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir ,

7738-931: The American Psychological Association , the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences , the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain , and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society . He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle , Surrey , Tel Aviv , McGill , Simon Fraser University and

7884-624: The Arapesh people , also in the Sepik, were pacifists , but she noted that they on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots among the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures, such as by Andrew Strathern . They are

8030-582: The Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker , is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect . Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal . Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn , receiving

8176-776: The Cognitive Neuroscience Society , and the American Humanist Association . He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018. Pinker was born in Montreal , Quebec, in 1954, to

8322-766: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as a revolutionary movement of "world-historic proportions," a writer for The New York Times considers Atran: ...a top anthropologist in Paris [who has combined] his research among disaffected youth with insights from such disparate figures as Hitler, Burke, Darwin and Hobbes, as well as close observation of the Islamic State’s advance into a 'globe-spanning jihadi archipelago'. He argues that we dismiss ISIS at our peril, and that in fact, we do much to promote its growth. Some of his historical conclusions will be controversial, but this

8468-544: The Jewish mother stereotype , a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes. Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority. As an Anglican Christian, Mead played

8614-560: The Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950 and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with the communications theorist Rudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive." In the 1960s, Mead served as

8760-754: The University of Tromsø . He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize , in 1998 and in 2003. Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association 's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution. For 2022 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in

8906-584: The connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding -ed to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language

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9052-472: The machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Pinker later makes use of

9198-523: The taxation of carbon , and the abolition of capital punishment . Pinker is a strong supporter of the Democratic Party . However, Pinker has argued that the far-left has created an atmosphere of intellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he described as an epidemic of censorship at universities. He was

9344-497: The "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies. In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language (1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two. "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of

9490-413: The "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called "whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading

9636-615: The 1985 Margaret Mead Award for her research on cultural factors affecting public health delivery. In 1972, Mead was one of the two rapporteurs from NGOs to the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In 1976, she was a key participant at UN Habitat I , the first UN forum on human settlements. Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham , Pennsylvania. Mead's first ethnographic work described

9782-417: The 2006 Beyond Belief symposium on the limits of reason and the role of religion in modern society highlight the differences between these authors, who see religion as fundamentally false beliefs associated with primitive cosmology, as well as politically and socially repressive, and Atran who sees unfalsifiable but semantically absurd religious beliefs and binding ritual obligations as historically critical to

9928-427: The 21st Century (2014), Pinker attempts to provide a writing style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, given that William Strunk wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, nearly a full century prior to Pinker’s publication. Pinker identifies as a liberal who is critical of some aspects of the far-left . He supports same-sex marriage , a universal basic income , the legalization of drugs ,

10074-564: The Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behaviour of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behaviour as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of

10220-698: The Axis powers to try and foster peace between the two sides. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the American Philosophical Society in 1977. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she

10366-462: The Devoted Actor framework in an effort to “help to inform policy decisions for the common defense.” According to reporting from CNN : The researchers discovered that three crucial factors motivate both ISIS fighters and those fighting them: a deep commitment to sacred values, the readiness to forsake family for those values, and the perceived spiritual strength of the group or community that

10512-555: The Maya lowlands. Atran found that the Itza' rejected majority-culture offers for exploiting natural resources as violating spiritual injunctions that may represent the summary wisdom of centuries of experience; however, later follow-up studies suggest that this wisdom, and the sustainable practices it encouraged, are vanishing as the last Itza speakers die out. Atran's debates with Sam Harris , Dan Dennett , Richard Dawkins and others during

10658-611: The Middle East. His work on the ideology and social evolution of transnational terrorism, which has included fieldwork with mujahedin and supporters in Europe, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, and North Africa, has challenged common assumptions. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker summarizes some of Atran's findings thus: Far from being ignorant, impoverished, nihilistic, or mentally ill, suicide terrorists tend to be educated, middle class, morally engaged, and free of obvious psychopathology. Atran concluded that many of

10804-520: The Palestinians to their own state and would apologize for all wrongs done to the Palestinian people," or would "give up what they believe is their sacred right to the West Bank" or would "symbolically recognize the historic legitimacy of the right of return [without in fact granting it]". In summarizing the result, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker claims, "Unlike the bribes of money or peace,

10950-580: The Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead's depiction of "free love" among the Samoans. Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from

11096-543: The U.S. on universal and culture-specific aspects of biological categorization and environmental reasoning and decision making among Maya and other Native Americans. His research team has focused on immigration of Spanish-speaking Ladinos and highland Q'eqchi' people of Guatemala into the northern lowland Petén region, and their interaction with the lowland Itza whose language is near extinction but whose agro-forestry practices, including use of dietary and medicinal plants, may still tell us much about pre-colonial management of

11242-629: The United Nations Security Council on "Youth, Peace, and Security." Atran has also been a staunch opponent of political attempts to eliminate government funding for social science, arguing that it is critical to the national interest, including innovation and security in business, technology, medicine and defense. Atran has published research on the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict. He has collaborated on research on how political negotiations could be made more likely to produce agreement. Atran and

11388-661: The Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences . She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science , notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick. Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings. Mead's address to

11534-459: The ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture

11680-620: The advent of Homo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould . The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to " how did language evolve?" The article also presaged Pinker's argument in The Language Instinct . In 2006 Pinker provided to Alan Dershowitz ,

11826-532: The age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska , Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into

11972-418: The anthropologist Rhoda Metraux with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship. Mead had two sisters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, and a brother, Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist William Steig , and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married

12118-617: The anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures. Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by

12264-451: The assumption that music is the antecedent to language, as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music. Pinker has also been critical of " whole language " reading instruction techniques, stating in How the Mind Works , "...   the dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken] language

12410-588: The author Leo Rosten . Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig . During World War II, Mead along with other social scientist like Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, took on several different responsibilities. In 1940, Mead joined the Committee for National Morale. In 1941, she also contributed to an essay that was released in the Applied Anthropology, which created strategies to help produce propaganda with

12556-520: The basic situation, those surveyed were presented with "a two-state solution in which the Israelis would withdraw from 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees"; the proposal "did not go over well." For the second group, the hypothetical deal "was sweetened with cash compensation from the United States and the European Union, such as a billion dollars

12702-565: The battle against ISIS in Iraq, where he and his research team were assessing "will to fight" among the combatants: Atran fleshes out what he calls the 'Devoted Actor Framework' [as opposed to standard 'rational actor' frameworks], which pulls sacred values [which are immune to material trade offs] and identity fusion [complete merging of individual identity with group identity] into a single theory and offers advice for beating ISIS: 'The science suggests that sacred values are best opposed with other sacred values that inspire devotion, or by sundering

12848-465: The biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence. In 1929, Mead and Fortune visited Manus , now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul . She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it

12994-433: The book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist , and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions". In January 2005 Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers . Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end" may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science . In

13140-682: The category of "Humanities and Social Sciences". From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary . He wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, published in 2011. In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study", was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by

13286-400: The causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that allows anyone to rise above this state." In

13432-418: The children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as V past → V stem + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of

13578-427: The community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration. Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs and adultery. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity

13724-499: The connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution." In The Stuff of Thought (2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how

13870-598: The context of Western cultural traditions. Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania . Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania , and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at

14016-514: The controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture. A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it

14162-745: The effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League . Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions. In an appearance for BBC World Service 's Exchanges At The Frontier programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature ) could have expressed in our biology either through genetic or epigenetic expression. Pinker responded that it

14308-1386: The fighter represents. [But] 'in our material world, we have underestimated or underplayed the spiritual dimension of human action,' [Atran] said. 'Doing so runs the risk of leaving ourselves open to people who are motivated by deeper spiritual and sacred values and virtues, and I think that's the greatest danger we face.' Atran argues in an interview in The Washington Post that: "Never in history have so few people with so few means caused so much fear." He and his research colleagues at ARTIS International contend that: Despite intense efforts by intelligence agencies and countless conferences, articles, and books, fundamental aspects of terrorism remain unclear: What identifies terrorists before they act; how do they radicalize; what motivates their violence; when do they act; what countermeasures are most effective? These efforts to find answers have fallen short in part because... policymakers tend to fit such information to prevailing paradigms in foreign policy, military doctrine, and criminal justice, each with serious drawbacks when applied to terrorism." Atran and colleagues propose an alternative approach, driven by theoretically framed field research that ground-truths big data and informs policy-making while maintaining intellectual independence. In 2017, Atran co-authored

14454-413: The foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa , Mead's advisor, Franz Boas , wrote of the book's significance: Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. In this way, the book tackled

14600-538: The formation and social cohesion of large-scale societies and current motivators for both conflict and cooperation. Margaret Mead This is an accepted version of this page Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist , author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of

14746-449: The fused social networks that embed those values.' Left unspoken: How do you offer an equally inspiring alternative? By what method can those social networks be sundered? Atran doesn’t pretend to know the answer, but he does think that current attempts at so-called "countermessaging" are destined to fail because those messages are 'disembodied from the social networks in which ideas are embedded and given life.' Scholarly squabbles aside, there

14892-942: The general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive , rather than positivist , approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from

15038-479: The humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that the human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism . The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his next book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021). In 2004, Pinker

15184-659: The inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics . Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records . The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead , explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History . She

15330-558: The integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods. Eleanor Leacock traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living in urban areas . The research results indicate that the assertions of Derek Freeman were seriously flawed. Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. Freeman, meanwhile, had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and gang violence. Mead

15476-551: The intent of raising national morale. In 1942, Mead served as the executive director of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, which served to gather data on American citizens ability to get food and their overall diet during the war. During World War II, Mead also served on the Institute for Intercultural Studies (IIS), whose prime objective was to research the “national character” of

15622-507: The life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago in 1926. The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward. In

15768-495: The most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy.... Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: ...fraternal, fast-breaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool. Regarding Atran's analysis of

15914-428: The motives may be found in nepotistic altruism... [Atran shows that] Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups [hold] out a carrot rather than a stick to the terrorist's family in the form of generous monthly stipends, lump-sum payments, and massive prestige in the community.... Atran has [also] found that suicide terrorists can be recruited without these direct incentives. Probably the most effective call to martyrdom

16060-687: The planet at any time in history, or for symbolic affronts such as the presence of infidel soldiers on sacred Muslim soil. Atran has summarized his work and conclusions: When you look at young people like the ones who grew up to blow up trains in Madrid in 2004, carried out the slaughter on the London underground in 2005, hoped to blast airliners out of the sky en route to the United States in 2006 and 2009, and journeyed far to die killing infidels in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia; when you look at whom they idolize, how they organize, what bonds them and what drives them; then you see that what inspires

16206-827: The popular press, and in scientific journals in a variety of disciplines. He has briefed members of the US Congress and the National Security Council staff with documents and presentations including "The Devoted Actor versus the Rational Actor in World Conflict", "Comparative Anatomy and Evolution of Global Network Terrorism" and "Pathways to and from Violent Extremism". He was an early critic of U.S. intervention in Iraq and of deepening involvement in Afghanistan. In April 2015, he addressed

16352-435: The processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked". In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by

16498-428: The psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin and political scientist Khalil Shikaki conducted an experiment that surveyed "600 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, more than 500 Palestinian refugees, and more than 700 Palestinian students, half of whom identified with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad." The researchers divided the subjects into three groups, each presented with a different "hypothetical peace deal." In

16644-539: The psychology of cooperation and of communication, including emotional expression, euphemism , innuendo , and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on. Pinker has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued

16790-502: The question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. Mead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have little social standing within

16936-412: The related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate . Sampson argues that "while it may seem attractive to argue the nature side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better support the creativity and nobility of the human mind." Sampson denies there

17082-419: The return boat she met Reo Fortune , a New Zealander headed to Cambridge , England, to study psychology . They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter , a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950)

17228-440: The right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region?” he said, “Yes, but the Palestinians would have to show that they sincerely mean it, change their textbooks and anti-Semitic characterizations and then allow some border adjustments so that Ben Gurion [Airport] would be out of range of shoulder-fired missiles.” Atran has worked with the United Nations Security Council and has been engaged in conflict negotiations in

17374-457: The same way, except that they saw the symbolic concession as only an introduction to significant material concessions as well. For example, when the researchers asked Mousa Abu Marzook , deputy chairman of Hamas, about a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return, he said “No.” When he was offered a trade-off with a substantial material incentive, he said “No” even more emphatically; “we do not sell ourselves for any amount.” But when he

17520-667: The sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work. Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew. In 1999, Freeman published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research , including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in The New York Times , John Shaw stated that Freeman's thesis, though upsetting many, had by

17666-564: The symbolic concession of a sacred value by the enemy, especially when it acknowledges a sacred value on one's own side, reduced the absolutists' anger, disgust, and willingness to endorse violence." In a study of Middle East leaders published in Science (journal) , Atran interviewed leaders, as distinct from popular views. In the earlier responses, people rejected material concessions without symbolic concessions, but were open to negotiations that started with symbolic concessions. Leaders responded

17812-546: The theatre of ideas." Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker. The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America declined to strike Pinker from its lists and issued a response letter stating that "It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression." Pinker was named one of Time ' s 100 most influential people in

17958-399: The thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point

18104-435: The time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance. Recent work has nonetheless challenged Freeman's critique. A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views. In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded: There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in

18250-823: The topics discussed in the book. Critiqueing the book from the perspective of generative linguistics Charles Yang , in the London Review of Books , writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole". The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes, governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All Pinker (and

18396-518: The understanding of human nature in The New York Times . He discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book The Blank Slate . Pinker has been criticised for using the data of scientific racists (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the blogger Steven Sailer , with journalist Angela Saini stating that "for many people, Pinker's willingness to entertain

18542-409: The use of deaths per capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people. Archaeologist David Wengrow summarized Pinker's approach to archaeological science as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along". In his seventh popular book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in

18688-679: The village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928. After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman , who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa . Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that

18834-400: The voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six of Pinker's tweets. Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts

18980-476: The words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be

19126-408: The work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale". Pinker has stated that he condemns racism. In a November 2009 article for The New York Times , Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell 's essays, criticizing his analytical methods. Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy

19272-496: The world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy ' s 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from

19418-469: Was Benjamin Spock , whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule. Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict , one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With

19564-450: Was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create

19710-558: Was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University 's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served as president of

19856-570: Was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories. In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to

20002-679: Was elected as a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences . In 1974 he originated a debate at the Royaumont Abbey in France on the nature of universals in human thought and society. Other participants included linguist Noam Chomsky , psychologist Jean Piaget , anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Claude Lévi-Strauss , and biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod . Howard Gardner and others consider this event

20148-753: Was ideologically motivated. Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies became influential within the feminist movement since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri ) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia . Others have argued that there

20294-642: Was named in Time ' s "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policy ' s list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association , the National Academy of Sciences , the Royal Institution ,

20440-474: Was offered an apology, he said “Yes,” although an apology would only be a beginning. “Our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.” Similarly, when the researchers asked Binyamin Netanyahu (then opposition leader), “Would you seriously consider accepting a two-state solution following the 1967 borders if all major Palestinian factions, including Hamas, were to recognize

20586-435: Was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct . There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the linguistic nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition . The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and

20732-406: Was required. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality. In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to

20878-476: Was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology . It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky 's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar

21024-488: Was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson , who would also become an anthropologist. She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed. Mead's pediatrician

21170-464: Was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance. Pinker's 1994 The Language Instinct

21316-488: Was unlikely since "some of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable by biological evolution, which has a speed limit measured in generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred in, say, 50 years". Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to

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