(Canada, 1954) Canadian experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and writer. He is a Harvard College professor and holds the Johnston Family Professorship in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is well-known for his energetic and wide-ranging defence of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. His academic specialisations are perception and language development in children, and he has argued that language is an instinct or biological adaptation modelled by natural selection. He has written seven books aimed at the general public: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), and his most recent work, The Sense of Style (2014). He has received numerous awards.