Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, who returned to Harvard last fall after more than 20 years, sits in his spacious Williams James Hall office speaking about revolution.

But he is not your typical revolutionary.

On the one hand, you can tell he is a member of academia. Beyond one shoulder, a multi-colored model of the human brain sits on a windowsill; beyond the other and lofted above his desk lies three bookshelves containing his own written works, “including all the foreign translations and British editions, hardback and paperback,” he says.

But his relaxed demeanor and signature hair style—think Mick Jagger’s flowing mane plus curls—give him a pop, not professorial, appeal.

Like those of the greatest members of academia, Pinker’s revolution is a revolution of knowledge, yet like Jagger’s musical revolution, his is also one that reaches the masses. Pinker’s books question psychology’s conventional wisdom that environment rather than genes determines one’s character. Yet in defending “nature, not nurture,” Pinker’s language remains uncannily lucid and accessible to the “lay public” that does not call psychology its profession.

“Steve is a polymath whose breadth of knowledge and range of interests is really quite amazing,” says Professor of Psychology Richard J. McNally, adding that “the popularity of his recent books has heightened his visibility even among those relatively unfamiliar with psychology.”

Pinker brought his ideas and communication skills back to Harvard’s lecture halls this year—he earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1979 and taught here for one year in 1980-81—after honing those skills for the past two decades at MIT.

“I’d been at MIT for 21 years so it was a good time for a change,” says the Montreal, Canada native. “Also my interests have broadened since I’ve arrived at MIT” to the realms of evolutionary biology and physical anthropology—areas which, he says, he will be able to more effectively explore at Harvard.

In Pinker’s early career, he focused on language acquisition in children, but since then his research has led him to explore related fields of study, especially evolutionary psychology.

His 1997 book How the Mind Works explores how an innate set of emotions developed through evolution, not individual environment, forms character.

Pinker’s books have twice made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—in 1998 for How the Mind Works and in 2003 for The Blank Slate.

THE HUMAN MIND

After a light teaching load this past fall semester, in which he only guest lectured in graduate courses, Pinker taught Science B-62, “The Human Mind” and a graduate companion course, Psychology 3500, “The Human Mind: Talking Points” this spring. With 270 students, the Core class ranked fifth-highest in enrollment among all spring semester courses.

Students praised Pinker’s lecturing style, indicating that his lucidity in writing transfers over to the classroom.

“He has an uncanny ability to take something barely comprehensible and explain it in a way that pretty much anyone can understand,” says Colin J. Barclay ’07, who was enrolled in the course.