Emperor Has No Clothes Award

An award celebrating “plain speaking” on the shortcomings of religion by public figures was inaugurated by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 1999.

Steven Pinker - 2004

Presented at the annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Madison, Wis., on Oct. 29, 2004.

Evoluntary psychologist Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, who was formerly with MIT for 21 years, has been called:

"Science's agent provocateur" by the Guardian.

"Wunderkind" by The Washington Post.

He is often compared to a "rock star" on the lecture circuit.

He is a world-class psychologist, one of nation's best-known brain specialists and a top-tier scientist.

Steven Pinker was on Newsweek's 1995 list of "One Hundred Americans for the Next Century."

He made Time's List of the "World's 100 Most Influential People" (April 2004). (They put him in the "Scientists & Thinkers" department.)

His research has focused on visual cognition and the psychology of language, and won the Troland Award of the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association.

He has written four books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994); How the Mind Works (1997); Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999), and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), a bestseller.

Prof. Pinker is the three-time winner of the William James book Prize, The Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize and several other awards for these critically-acclaimed popular science books.

He is a Humanist Laureate and recipient of three honorary doctorates.

In the Introduction to How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker writes:

"Every idea in the book may turn out to be wrong. But that would be progress, because our old ideas were too vapid to be wrong."

He serves on the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, he was on the Scientific Advisory Panel of the "Evolution" series on NOVA, and is on the panel of the Endangered Language Fund.

He is an elected fellow of several scholarly societies including the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Neuroscience Research Program.

Steven Pinker was born in Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979.

He has said in interviews: "I was never religious in the theological sense. I never outgrew my conversion to atheist at 13."

He is "pro science" and "pro reason."

We award this statuette to Steven Pinker in appreciation of his forthright espousal of his rational views.

Emperor Award Acceptance speech: The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion

Recipients of the Emperor Has No Clothes Award: