Science Quote by Steven Pinker

Pinker is poking at a peculiarly modern kind of censorship: not the state banning an idea, but a social reflex that declares certain hypotheses morally radioactive before they can even be evaluated. The word “taboo” is doing heavy lifting. It frames the resistance not as careful skepticism about methods, measurement, or historical misuse, but as something closer to ritual disgust - a community enforcing purity rules around which explanations are permitted to exist.

The sentence is also a strategic narrowing. Pinker doesn’t claim that genes explain the correlations, only that “even the possibility” is often off-limits. That move matters: it casts his critics as anti-inquiry while positioning him as the sober defender of open science. It’s a classic rhetorical gambit in culture-war science debates: shift the fight from data to norms, from “what’s true?” to “why won’t you let us ask?”

The subtext is the long shadow of hereditarian arguments about intelligence, behavior, and group differences - terrain where bad statistics and worse politics have historically traveled together. In that context, “shared genes” reads like a pressure point: the kind of explanation that can be weaponized to naturalize inequality or excuse policy failure. Pinker is insisting that ethical anxiety shouldn’t harden into epistemic prohibition.

What makes the line work is its provocation. “Most cases” is broad enough to indict a whole institutional mood; “taboo” is sharp enough to sting. It’s not just a claim about correlations. It’s a critique of the moral economy of academia, where some questions are punished not for being wrong, but for being dangerous.