Language Is an Inherent Part of What Makes Us Unusual

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Language was never designed acommittee. It emerged because millions of people had ideas that they struggled to express. We developed language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them, for which we coined words. And languages, of course, are always continuing that cycle. Our language is different from the language of the founders or shakes pere. So i think warf went too far, but there's no doubt that language is an inherent part of what makes us unusual as a species and unique. Next question. Do you agree with the theory of group selection?

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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