understanding Quotes

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person.

I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.

We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.

In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.