Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they ju….

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history..

Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your li….

Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you'r….

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or….

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

We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one..

Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get….

Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology..

Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pai….

Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn ….

All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on..

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater de….

I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties..

In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth..

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary ….

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for viv….

I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift..

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied….

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?.