“I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.”

Canadian cognitive psychologist and public intellectual

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is known for his work on the mind, language, and human nature, and for presenting those subjects to a wide general audience. Pinker supports evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard University, and his writing often returns to questions about how people think, speak, and understand the world.