Christopher Michel · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pinker has spent his career arguing, across nine books for general readers, that language and mind are products of evolution rather than blank-slate conditioning — The Language Instinct (1994) and How the Mind Works (1997) laid out the case for a cognitive science shaped by natural selection. His The Better Angels of Our Nature (2010) marshaled historical data to argue that human violence has declined markedly over the long run, an argument he extended in Enlightenment Now (2018) to credit reason, science, and humanism for broader gains in the human condition. He is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.