- Charlie Munger Pinker's case that language is a human instinct, birthed by evolution. Munger recommended it in his 'Worldly Wisdom' talk, using it to illustrate that human language ability is not just learned but deeply buried in the brain. source ↗
Steven Pinker's case that language is not a cultural invention but a biological instinct — a complex, specialized faculty of the human brain shaped by evolution, with its own universal grammar and developmental timetable.
Munger recommended The Language Instinct in his 'Worldly Wisdom' talk to illustrate that human language ability is not just learned but deeply buried in the brain — a demonstration of how a cognitive faculty can seem consciously constructed when it is actually the product of evolved hardware. For founders, Pinker's book is a model for understanding the gap between what people say they do and what their cognition is actually doing, which is precisely the insight behind Munger's twenty-five standard causes of human misjudgment. The book also demonstrates that the most sophisticated software (language) runs on evolved biological hardware (the brain), which is exactly the kind of constraint-aware thinking Munger applied to business: understand the underlying architecture before you try to program it.