Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist and public intellectual who is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology, arguing across works such as The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002) that language and other mental faculties are innate behaviors shaped by natural selection rather than blank-slate products of culture alone. His 1990 paper with Paul Bloom on the evolution of language helped shift scholarly debate from whether language evolved to how it evolved.