Jagadeesan Janarthanam's Key Ideas from How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker

All of human psychology is days to be explained by a single, omnipotent cause: a large brain, culture, language, socialization, learning, complexity, self-organisation, neural-network dynamics.

Man's capacity for evil is never far from our minds, and it is easy to think that evil just comes along with intelligence as part of its very essence.

Man's capacity for evil is never far from our minds, and it is easy to think that evil just comes along with intelligence as part of its very essence.

Our common sense about other people is a kind of intuitive psychology - we try to infer people's beliefs and desires from what they do and try to predict or they will do from our gursses about their beliefs and desires.

Our intuitive psychology, though, must make the assumption that other people have beliefs and desires.

Our mental solves its unsolvable problem by a leap of faith about how the world works, by making assumptions that are indispensable but indefensible - the only defence being that the assumptions worked well enough in the world of our ancestors.

To understand is not to forgive.

Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognising them as separate can we have them both.