Conversation: Steven Pinker on Decline of Human Violence

Steven Pinker's most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - the topic of this conversation. This talk was part of the GET Conference (for people working at the frontiers of human biology), a production of The Personal Genome Project.



Conversation: Steven Pinker on Decline of Human Violence from The Personal Genome Project on FORA.tv

Conversation: Steven Pinker on Decline of Human Violence

A conversation with Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and Stephen Heuser, Ideas Editor, The Boston Globe, on the decline of human violence.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world's foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine's "The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals," Foreign Policy's "100 Global Thinkers," and Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today." His most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

ABOUT THIS CONFERENCE

The GET Conference is the event for people working at the frontiers of human biology. We invite leading thinkers to discuss the important ways in which new genomic technologies will affect all of our lives in the coming years and to debate their technical, commercial, and societal impacts. We bring together scientists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, practitioners, investors, researchers, and others to discuss advances in our ability to measure and understand human biology. The GET Conference is produced by PersonalGenomes.org, a nonprofit organization which aims to increase biological literacy and improve human health through its support of the Personal Genome Project and other groundbreaking initiatives.

ABOUT PERSONAL GENOME PROJECT

In an unprecedented achievement, the Human Genome Project provided the first drafts of nearly complete human genome sequences in 2001 after more than a decade of effort by scientists worldwide. This information is now being used to advance medicine, human biology, and knowledge of human origins.

We foresee a day when many individuals will want to get their own genome sequenced so that they may use this information to understand such things as their individual risk profiles for disease, their physical and biological characteristics, and their personal ancestries. To get to this point will require a critical mass of interested users, tools for obtaining and interpreting genome information, and supportive policy, research, and service communities. To catalyze these developments, we launched the Personal Genome Project (PGP).

For more information, visit: http://www.personalgenomes.org