Biography Of The Father Of Evolutionary Psychology Steven Pinker
The father of evolutionary psychology, Steven Pinker, was born in 1954 in Montreal and is considered one of the area’s foremost and most talented researchers.
He has made major contributions to children’s language development. For all these reasons, today we will talk about Steven Pinker’s life and some of his most interesting books.
Steven Pinker’s life
Steven Pinker was born into a Jewish family. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a vice-chancellor and curator. His sister is a child psychologist and journalist, and his brother is a political analyst.
In 1979, Steven Pinker received his doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard University. He then got a job as a researcher and teacher at Stanford University and MIT.
Steven Pinker has been married three times. He first married a clinical psychologist named Nancy Etcoff. He then married a cognitive psychologist named Illavenin Subbiah.
He is currently married to philosophy teacher Rebecca Goldstein.
Between 1994 and 1999, Pinker led the Center for Cognitive Science. He currently works as a professor at Harvard and continues with research and writing.
He also participates in many debates and conferences on science and humanity.
Contributions and publications
Early in his professional career, Steven Pinker focused on exploring his son’s language development.
He wanted to support Chomsky’s theory that language is a formal, universal and inherent mechanism, which is neither pragmatic nor semantic.
He agreed with Chomsky that language was innate, but Pinker believed that it relied on cognitive processes, such as memorizing words and learning how to use them with grammatical rules.
One of his best books is The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language . But there is another book worth mentioning: Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language .
In addition to his interest in linguistics, Steven Pinker also researches human behavior. In fact, one of his most famous books is called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined .
He has also focused a lot on theories concerning the human mind. His main books in this are called How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate .
Pinker has also written many essays on language and the mind. Some of the top ones are called “The Rules of Language”, “Language as an Adaptation to the Cognitive Niche” and “So How Does the Mind Work”.
They are all fascinating and important articles that are worth taking a look at.
Father of Evolutionary Psychology Steven Pinker: An Influential Person
Everything that Pinker has done has not gone unnoticed. In 2004, the famous magazine Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
The journals Prospect and Foreign Policy also stated that he was one of the 100 most important intellectual figures in the world in 2005.
But we can not omit the fact that Steven Pinker has also received honorary degrees from a number of different universities and that he wrote articles for The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Steven Pinker studies the human mind, language and behavior. The articles he writes are fascinating and very modern. If he sounds interesting to you, we recommend that you read some of his works!
