Genetically Involved Traits

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Imagine that parents could influence or design the children they have, above and beyond eliminating a few particular diseases. Does that worry you? Or does that get you excited, that we're going to have smarter, better people? I'm sceptical of the premise. As someone who was very interested in a genetically influenced traits. And was excited in the nineties possibility that we'd find the gen for this or the gen for that. But there were a number of discoveries which turned out to be false alarms.

Steven Pinker has spent an entire academic career thinking deeply about language, cognition, and human nature. Driving it all, he says, is an Enlightenment belief that the world is intelligible, science can progress, and through rational inquiry we can better understand ourselves.

He recently joined Tyler for a conversation not only on the power of reason, but also the economics of irrational verbs, whether violence will continue to decline, behavioral economics, existential threats, the merits of aerobic exercise, photography, group selection, Fermi’s paradox, Noam Chomsky, universal grammar, free will, the Ed Sullivan show, and why people underrate the passive (or so it is thought).

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