If you’re never heard of Steven Pinker, the Canadian born experimental psychologist, our timeline will give you a nice and easy introduction to his long and distinguished career:

1954 - Born September 18th, in Montreal, Canada

1976 – BA degree in psychology at McGill University

1979 – Receives PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University. Much of his initial research is in visual cognition, the ability to imagine shapes, recognize faces and objects, and direct attention within the visual field. In graduate school he had cultivated an interest in language, particularly language development in children, and this topic eventually takes over his research activities.

1982 – Teacher at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, eventually director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience

1994 – Publishes first of five books for a general audience including ‘The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature’ (2002), which explores the political, moral, and emotional colorings of human nature

2004 – Named one of Time Magazine’s most influential scientists and thinkers in the world

2005 - He proves scientifically that there is a difference between the genders, notably that there are ‘more idiots and more geniuses’ in the male gender. These findings are seen as a defense of Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty.

2006 – Named ‘Humanist of the Year’ by the American Humanist Association

2008 – Becomes Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard 2009 - writes very a critical review of Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times, calling his latest book at ‘spectacular failure’, and arguing against Gladwell’s claim that a greater IQ does not lead to greater intellectual achievements. Gladwell publishes a rebuttal to Pinker in the Times, stating that Pinker lives on a lonely ice floe of I.Q. fundamentalism. See their exchange of letters here: http://nyti.ms/4EPwYh

2010 – Named as a top global thinker by Foreign Policy Magazine

2011 – Announced that Pinker is to be a professor at the New College of the Humanities, AC Grayling’s new London college, which opens its doors in October 2012, with a star-studded professoriate and an exclusive Bloomsbury location. The college was set up as a response to the ‘chronic underfunding’ of British universities over the last decade, according to Grayling, and sparked a big backlash from its detractors.

See Steven Pinker speak at the upcoming IQ2 event. Click here to buy your tickets.