Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Canadian American cognitive psychologist and the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. He began with language, arguing in The Language Instinct that grammar is a biological adaptation rather than a cultural invention, and later turned to long-run data on violence and progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. He writes for general readers deliberately, and argues that the case for reason and science has to be made rather than assumed.