Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish household in Montreal, the grandson of factory owners who had come from Poland and Romania in 1926 to make neckties, and the son of a lawyer-turned-real-estate-agent and a high school guidance counselor. He declared himself an atheist at 13 and stayed one. He studied at Dawson College and then McGill, taking a psychology degree in 1976, and went on to Harvard for a doctorate in experimental psychology, finished in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn, at a moment when the dominant idea in his field still treated the human mind as an essentially blank surface that culture and environment wrote on.

Pinker built his academic career at MIT from 1979 to 2003, then moved to Harvard as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. His books make an argument that runs through three decades: that language is an evolved biological instinct rather than a cultural invention, laid out in The Language Instinct in 1994; that human nature is not the blank slate a generation of social science had assumed, argued at length in The Blank Slate in 2002; and that, measured by the numbers rather than the headlines, violence and cruelty have declined sharply over the long run of history, the claim at the center of The Better Angels of Our Nature in 2011 and Enlightenment Now in 2018. Each book pushed him further into public argument for reason and secular humanism as engines of improvement.

In 2006 Pinker wrote a letter, at Alan Dershowitz's request, explaining his reading of the federal enticement statute Jeffrey Epstein faced — reasoning Dershowitz then used in Epstein's defense. Pinker later said he had not grasped the case's severity and was never paid for it, but the letter resurfaced during the broader reckoning over who had helped shield Epstein and became a recurring citation against him. It was not his only fight: in 2005 he publicly defended Harvard president Lawrence Summers's suggestion that innate sex differences might partly explain the shortage of women in math and science, and in 2020 more than 300 linguists signed an open letter accusing him of using his standing in the field to minimize concerns about racist and sexist violence.

Pinker remains a fixture of Time's most-influential lists and a regular presence in debates over free speech on campus, effective altruism, and how much progress the modern world has actually made. His scientific claims about language as an evolved instinct are broadly accepted within linguistics, even by critics like Geoffrey Sampson who disputed the details. His empirical claims about declining violence remain genuinely contested among historians and demographers, who argue over his methods and his choice of which centuries to count. In December 2024 he resigned from a freethought organization's honorary board in protest of what he called its retreat into 'quasi-religious' politics.

Steven Pinker's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Language Instinct book 1994
• How the Mind Works book 1997
• The Blank Slate book
  Defense of evolutionary psychology against blank-slate views of human nature 2002
• The Better Angels of Our Nature book
  Argues that violence has declined across history 2011
• Enlightenment Now book 2018

• September 18, 1954 aged 0 Born in Montreal, Quebec
• 1976 aged ~22 Earns a B.A. in psychology from McGill University
• 1979 aged ~25 Earns his Ph.D. from Harvard and joins MIT's faculty
• 1994 aged ~40 Publishes The Language Instinct
• 2002 aged ~48 Publishes The Blank Slate
• 2003 aged ~49 Moves to Harvard as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology
• 2006 aged ~52 Writes a legal-reasoning letter for Alan Dershowitz in the Epstein case
• 2011 aged ~57 Publishes The Better Angels of Our Nature
• 2018 aged ~64 Publishes Enlightenment Now

• Noam Chomsky b. 1928
  Linguist and political activist whose theories revolutionized the study of language and cognitive science. extended his linguistics, then broke from him politically
• B. F. Skinner 1904–1990
  Developed operant conditioning and made behaviorism the dominant mid-century American psychology. argued against the blank slate built by
• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. targeted the nurture case built partly on
• Malcolm Gladwell b. 1963
  Staff writer for The New Yorker whose books on social science became publishing phenomena. wrote a scathing review of
• Alan Dershowitz b. 1938
  Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar known for his high-profile legal defenses and writings. wrote the Epstein defense memo requested by