Steven Pinker Dialogue
The Munk Debates Podcast
00:00
The Cave Man Brain Argument
The author says we shouldn't blame our current craziness on our hunter gathere cestors. The first few pages of the book describe how san of the kalahari desert, formerly called the bushmen, but one of th the most recent surviving hunter-gatherers. And they use an awful lot of rationality to eking out an existence from an unforgiving environment. So it's in our nature. Yes, we we don't innately command the theorems of logic and probability. Those have to be learned in school. But we do have an intuitive sense of rationality. And this question of what social institutions bring it out is there.
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