title: Taboo

text: The term "taboo" comes from the Tongan "tapu" or Fijian "tabu" ("prohibited", "disallowed", "forbidden"), related among others to the Māori "tapu" and Hawaiian "kapu". Its English use dates to 1777 when the British explorer James Cook visited Tonga, and referred to the Tongans' use of the term "taboo" for "any thing that is forbidden to be eaten, or made use of". Having invited some of the Tongan aristocracy to dinner aboard his ship, Cook wrote:


title: Taboo

text: The term was translated to him as "consecrated, inviolable, forbidden, unclean or cursed". "Tabu" itself has been derived from alleged Tongan morphemes "ta" ("mark") and "bu" ("especially"), but this may be a folk etymology (Tongan does not actually have a phoneme /b/), and "tapu" is usually treated as a unitary, non-compound word inherited from Proto-Polynesian *"tapu", in turn inherited from Proto-Oceanic *"tabu", with the reconstructed meaning "sacred, forbidden". In its current use on Tonga, the word "tapu" means "sacred" or "holy", often in the sense of being restricted or protected by custom or law. On the main island, the word is often appended to the end of "Tonga" as "Tongatapu", here meaning "Sacred South" rather than "Forbidden South".


title: Taboo

text: Sigmund Freud speculated that incest and patricide were the only two universal taboos and formed the basis of civilization. However, although cannibalism, in-group murder, and incest are taboo in the majority of societies, exceptions can be found, such as marriages between brothers and sisters in Roman Egypt. Modern Western societies, however, do not condone such relationships. These familial sexual activities are criminalised, even if all parties are consenting adults. Through an analysis of the language surrounding these laws, it can be seen how the policy makers, and society as a whole, find these acts to be immoral.


title: Taboo

text: Common taboos involve restrictions or ritual regulation of killing and hunting; sex and sexual relationships; reproduction; the dead and their graves; as well as food and dining (primarily cannibalism and dietary laws such as vegetarianism, "kashrut", and "halal") or religious (treif and haram). In Madagascar, a strong code of taboos, known as "fady", constantly change and are formed from new experiences. Each region, village or tribe may have its own "fady".


title: Taboo

text: The word "taboo" gained popularity at times, with some scholars looking for ways to apply it where other English words had previously been applied. For example, J. M. Powis Smith, in his book "The American Bible" (editor's preface 1927), used "taboo" occasionally in relation to Israel's Tabernacle and ceremonial laws, including , ; ; , , and .


title: Taboo

text: Albert Schweitzer wrote a chapter about taboos of the people of Gabon. As an example, it was considered a misfortune for twins to be born, and they would be subject to many rules not incumbent on other people.


title: Taboo

text: According to Joseph Campbell, taboos are used in religion and mythology to test a person's ability to withhold from violating a prohibition given to them. Should one fail the test and violate a taboo, they would be subsequently punished or will face the consequences of their actions. It is important to note, however, that taboos are not societal prohibitions (such as incest); rather, the use of "taboo" in these stories relates to its original meaning of "prohibition": for example, a character could be prohibited from looking, eating, and speaking or uttering a certain word.


title: Taboo

text: An example of an eating taboo in Greek mythology could be found in the tale of the rape of Persephone. Hades, who had fallen in love with Persephone and wished to make her his queen, burst through a cleft in the earth and abducted Persephone as she was gathering flowers in a field. When Demeter, Persephone's mother, finds out of her daughter's abduction, she forbids the earth to produce (or she neglects the earth) and, in the depth of her despair, causes nothing to grow. Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, forced Hades to return Persephone. However, it was explained to Demeter that Persephone would be released, so long as she did not taste the food of the dead. Hades complies with the request to return Persephone to Demeter, but first, he tricks Persephone, forcing her to break the eating taboo by giving her some pomegranate seeds to eat. In other interpretations, Persephone is seen eating the pomegranate seeds as a result of temptation or hunger. In the end, Hermes is sent to retrieve her but, because she had tasted the food of the underworld, she was obliged to spend a third of each year (the winter months) there, and the remaining part of the year with the gods above. With the later writers Ovid and Hyginus, Persephone's time in the underworld becomes half the year.


title: Taboo

text: The most notable looking taboo in Greek myth can be found in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, the son of Apollo, was well-renowned as a legendary musician whose music could move anything and everything, living or not, in the world. While walking among her people in tall grass at her wedding, Eurydice was set upon by a satyr. In her efforts to escape the satyr, Eurydice fell into a nest of vipers and suffered a fatal bite on her heel. Her body was discovered by Orpheus who, overcome with grief, played such sad and mournful songs that all the humans, nymphs, and gods learnt about his sorrow and grief and wept with him. On the gods' advice, Orpheus traveled to the Underworld wherein his music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, who agreed to allow Eurydice to return with him to earth on one condition: he should guide her out and not look back until they both had reached the upper world. As he reached the upper world, Orpheus looked back toward Eurydice in his eagerness to reunite with her, tragically forgetting about the looking taboo given to him by Hades, and since Eurydice had not crossed into the upper world, she vanishes back into the Underworld, this time forever.


title: Taboo

text: A speaking taboo in Greek myth can be found in the story of the Anchises, the father of the Trojan prince and warrior Aeneas. Anchises was a mortal lover of the goddess Aphrodite, who had fallen in love with Anchises after Zeus persuaded Eros to shoot her with an arrow to cause these emergent feelings. One interpretation recounts that Aphrodite pretended to be a Phrygian princess and seduced him, only to later reveal herself as a goddess and inform Anchises that she will bear him a son named Aeneas; however, Aphrodite warns Anchises not to tell anyone that he had lain with a goddess. Anchises does not heed this speaking taboo and later brags about his encounter with Aphrodite, and as a result, he is struck in the foot with a thunderbolt by Zeus. Thereafter, he is lame in that foot so that Aeneas has to carry him from the flames of Troy.


title: Taboo

text: Another, albeit lesser-known, speaking taboo in Greek myth can be found in the story of Actaeon. Actaeon, whilst on a hunting trip in the woods, mistakenly and haplessly happened upon the bathing Artemis. When Artemis realized that Actaeon had seen her undressed, thus desecrating her chastity, she punished him for his luckless profanation of her virginity's mystery by forbidding him from speech. Whether it be due to forgetfulness or outright resistance, Actaeon defied his speaking taboo and called for his hunting dogs. Due to his failure in abiding by his speaking taboo, Artemis turned Actaeon into a stag and turned his dogs upon him. Actaeon was torn apart and ravaged by his loyal dogs who did not recognize their former master.


title: Taboo

text: Possibly the most famous eating taboo (if not taboo, in general) is in the story of Adam and Eve in the Abrahamic religions. In the Judeo-Christian telling, found in , Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden of Eden by God and are told not to eat from a tree lest they die, but Eve is promptly tempted by a serpent (often identified as Satan in disguise) to eat from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they will surely not die, rather, they might become "like God". Eve violates the eating taboo and eats from the forbidden fruit of the tree, shortly giving some fruit to her companion, Adam. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve are aware of their nakedness and cover themselves with fig leaves and hide from God. God realizes that they are hiding and interrogates them about having eaten from the tree whereupon Adam assigns the blame to Eve and Eve assigns it to the serpent. As a result, God condemns Eve with pain in childbirth and subordination to her husband, he condemns Adam to have to labor on the earth for his food and be reduced into the earth at death, and in the Christian tradition, he condemns all of humanity for this original sin. God then expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden lest they eat from the Tree of Life and become immortal "like Him".


title: Taboo

text: In Islam, the story of Adam and Eve is quite different, though it contains an eating taboo: the Quran mentions that Adam (Arabic: ), as the successive authority of earth by decree of Allah, is placed in a paradisal garden (not Jannah nor the Garden of Eden) therein along with his wife (unnamed in the Quran, though the Hadith gives her the name Ḥawwā’, Arabic: ); such a paradise this garden was, that they would never go hungry nor unclothed, nor would they ever thirst or be exposed to the sun's heat. However, Allah took a promise from Adam:


title: Taboo

text: Iblis, angered at his expulsion from Jannah for refusing to bow to Adam at his inception, decided to trick Adam and his wife into being shunned by Allah, just as he was; however, Allah had warned Adam and his wife about Iblis, telling them that he was a "clear enemy". Iblis swore in the name of Allah that he was their sincere advisor, revealed unto Adam and his wife each other's nakedness, and convinced them to eat from the forbidden tree so that they may never taste death. After eating from the tree (thus breaking the eating taboo), Allah removes Adam and his wife from their paradisal garden, telling them that mankind will be condemned with some being enemies with others on the earth wherein they will be provided habitation and provision, for a while, and


title: Taboo

text: However, in the Gnostic telling of this story, the taboo is a plot by the archons to keep Adam in a state of ignorance by preventing him from eating the fruit, which allows him to attain gnosis after the serpent, who is viewed as representative of the divine world, convinces him and Eve to eat it.


title: Taboo

text: A looking taboo can be found in the Judeo-Christian telling of the story of Lot found within the Book of Genesis. In , two angels in the form of men arrived in Sodom at eventide and were invited by Lot to spend the night at his home. However, the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked and demanded Lot that he bring his two guests out so that they might "know" them; instead, Lot offered up his two daughters, whom had not "known" man, but they refused. As dawn was breaking, Lot's visiting angels urged him to get his family and flee, so as to avoid being caught in the impending disaster for the iniquity of the city. The command was given, "Flee for your life! Do not look behind you, nor stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, lest you be swept away." Whilst fleeing, however, Lot's wife broke the looking taboo by turning to look back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for disobeying the angels' warning.


title: Taboo

text: Communist and materialist theorists have argued that taboos can be used to reveal the histories of societies when other records are lacking. Marvin Harris explains taboos as a consequence of ecologic and economic conditions.


title: Taboo

text: Some argue that contemporary Western multicultural societies have taboos against tribalisms (for example, ethnocentrism and nationalism) and prejudices (racism, sexism, homophobia, extremism and religious fanaticism).


title: Taboo

text: Changing social customs and standards also create new taboos, such as bans on slavery; extension of the pedophilia taboo to ephebophilia; prohibitions on alcohol, tobacco, or psychopharmaceutical consumption (particularly among pregnant women), also sexual harassment and sexual objectification are increasingly becoming taboo in recent decades.


title: Taboo

text: Incest itself has been pulled both ways, with some seeking to normalize consensual adult relationships regardless of the degree of kinship (notably in Europe) and others expanding the degrees of prohibited contact (notably in the United States). Although the term "taboo" usually implies negative connotations, it is sometimes associated with enticing propositions in proverbs such as "forbidden fruit is the sweetest".


title: Taboo

text: In medicine, professionals who practice in ethical and moral grey areas, or fields subject to social stigma such as late termination of pregnancy, may refrain from public discussion of their practice. Among other reasons, this taboo may come from concern that comments may be taken out of the appropriate context and used to make ill-informed policy decisions that would lead to (otherwise preventable) maternal death.


title: Jeon Yeo-been

text: Jeon Yeo-been (; born Jeon Bo-young on July 26, 1989) is a South Korean actress. Jeon rose to prominence for her performance in the independent film "After My Death" (2018) which earned her the Actress of the Year Award at the 22nd Busan International Film Festival and the Independent Star Award at the 2017 Seoul Independent Film Festival. Jeon's career continues to rise after she starred in the television series "Vincenzo" (2021) and the crime action film "Night in Paradise" (2021).


title: Jeon Yeo-been

text: Jeon learned acting when she studied Broadcast Entertainment at Dongduk Women's University. She started acting 5 years later after actress and director Moon So-ri saw her in a trailer for the Seoul International Women's Film Festival and contacted her to make an appearance in the short film "The Best Director".


title: Jeon Yeo-been

text: In 2015, Jeon made her debut in the period drama film "The Treacherous". In 2017, Jeon portrayed an undercover journalist investigating a religious cult in the thriller TV series "Save Me". Jeon rose to prominence after her performance in "After My Death" (2018), and received numerous accolades, including Best New Actress at the 56th Grand Bell Awards, the Actress of the Year Award at the 22nd Busan International Film Festival, and the Independent Star Award at the 2017 Seoul Independent Film Festival.


title: Jeon Yeo-been

text: In September 2020, Jeon starred in the crime action film "Night in Paradise". In February 2021, she starred in tvN television series "Vincenzo" alongside Song Joong-ki. On March 15, 2021, Jeon was cast in Netflix upcoming series "Glitch". She is set to portray a woman who is looking for her missing boyfriend. On July 12, 2021, she signed with Management MMM after her contract with J.Wide Company expired.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Vegetarian and vegan dietary practices vary among countries. Differences include food standards, laws, and general cultural attitudes toward vegetarian diets.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In some instances, vegetarians that choose to abstain from dairy may be labeled as vegan. However, veganism typically refers to abstaining from any act that may directly or indirectly injure any sentient being.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The concept of vegetarianism to indicate 'vegetarian diet' is first mentioned by the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras of Samos around 500 BCE. Followers of several religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism also advocated vegetarianism, and believed that humans should not inflict pain on other animals.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Some countries have strong cultural or religious traditions that promote vegetarianism, such as India, while other countries have secular ethical concerns, including animal rights, environmental protection, and health concerns. In many countries, food labeling laws make it easier for vegetarians to identify foods compatible with their diets.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In January 2022, Google revealed that searches for "vegan food near me" have dramatically increased in 2021 and attributed it to "breakthrough status", meaning it increased by 5,000 percent or more indicating the rising popularity of vegan diets.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The percentages in the following table estimates prevalence of dietary vegetarianism and dietary veganism. The distinction is important between dietary vegans and other vegans. Dietary vegans may use leather or other non-food animal products, while other vegans (sometimes called "lifestyle" or "ethical" vegans) use no animal products of any type.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to a Nielsen survey, the Africa/Middle East region (of which Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates were surveyed), has 16% vegetarians and 6% vegans, making it the second-most vegetarian region after Asia.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Vegan dishes are commonplace in Ethiopian cuisine due to mandates by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Egyptian Coptic Christianity that require weekly fasting days (fasting in this context is abstaining from all meat products).


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: As the majority of the population of Mauritius is Hindu, vegetarianism is common and vegetarian cuisine is widely available in restaurants.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Countries in North Africa have a tradition of cooking in a vegetarian style, with Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia being particularly connected with this type of cooking which includes couscous and spiced vegetables.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Hindu and Jain immigrants from India brought vegetarianism with them. This trend has been documented as far back as 1895 in Natal Province.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Of five world regions, the Asia-Pacific region has the highest share of vegetarians (19%) and vegans (9%).


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In China, a small but growing number of young people is getting to become vegan in the large cities. An estimated 4 to 5 percent of Chinese are vegetarian.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Chinese folk religion, which is distinct from Taoism, Chinese salvationist religions, and New Religious Movements is similar to Shintoism in Japan insofar as while the killing and eating of animals is not forbidden, it is considered impure and not ideal for practicing. Tofu, soy milk, and seitan, which are popular among vegetarians in the world, originated in China.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Classical Chinese texts pointed to a period of abstinence from meat before undertaking matters of great importance or of religious significance. People typically abstain from meat periodically, particularly the day before Chinese New Year. Although it is more common among adherents of Chinese folk religions, many secular people also do this.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Ancient China was once known for having profound veganism in its food culture. Its widespread vegetarianism originally comes from the Buddhist code (Vinaya) transferred from ancient India which valued not killing animals. With the influx of Buddhist influences, vegetarianism became more popular, but there is a distinction—Taoist vegetarianism is based on a perception of purity, while Buddhist vegetarianism is based on the dual bases of refraining from killing and subduing one's own subservience to the senses. Because of this, two types of "vegetarianism" came to be—one where one refrained from eating meat, the other being refraining from eating meat as well as garlic, onions, and other such strongly flavored foods. This Buddhism-influenced vegetarianism has been known and practiced by some since at least the 7th century. People who are Buddhist may also avoid eating eggs.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The early 20th century saw some intellectuals espousing vegetarianism as part of their program for reforming China culturally, not just politically. The anarchist thinker Li Shizeng, for instance, argued that tofu and soy products were healthier and could be a profitable export. Liang Shuming, a philosopher and reform activist, adopted a basically vegetarian diet, but did not promote one for others. In recent years, it has seen a resurgence in the cities among the emerging middle class.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In Japan, it was considered normal to have meat in daily diet. But after the buddhism arrived to the country, the emperor at that time made a law in 675 AC to restrict people from eating cows, horses, dogs, monkeys and chickens. This change is assumed to be a contributor to the spread of "精進料理 (Shôjin Ryôri)," a type of meals that is still eaten at contemporary Buddhist temples.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Even though "shôjin ryôrii" is often assumed the same as vegetarian, it has its roots in religion, and the word "shôjin ryôrii" refers to the different ways of cooking and table manners that differ by religious branches, not only it being vegetarian meals. Some of the differences between vegetarian foods and "shôjin ryôrii" is that the usage of onions, garlics, or herbs and vegetables that have strong smells is avoided in addition to the avoidance of meat, and this is because consumption of those foods is believed to prevent one from focusing in Buddhist practices.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to The Food and Beverage News, vegetarianism grew from over 7,000 in 2015 to nearly 30,000 in 2019, and many converted due to health reasons. Some of the popular reasons for changing their diet are ethical concerns, environmental protection concerns, and to lose weight.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A study by the Korean Agro-Fisheries and Food Trade Corporation found that from a study of 5,510 respondents, 418 people followed a diet that refrained from eating meat. From the statistic, 79.7% of them identified as flexitarians (those who eat meat rarely), 11% of them identified as pollotarians and pescatarians  (those who still eat poultry but no other meats, and those who still eat fish but no meats), and 6% of them are vegetarians.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: With the addition of Beyond Meat and other plant-based meat alternatives hit the shelves of the world. Lotte Mart, a Korean grocery store, noticed the growth in the popularity of meat alternatives. They then produced an alternative to meat called Gogi Dasein, which translates to “instead of meat.”


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: There are more than 6,000 vegetarian eating establishments in Taiwan. The country's food labelling laws for vegetarian food are the world's strictest, because it has been estimated that more than 3 million Taiwanese people eat vegetarian food, which accounts for approximately 13% of the national population.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A popular movement of "one day vegetarian every week" has been advocated on a national level. Also, on a local level, even government bodies are involved, such as the Taipei City Board of Education.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Vegetarian food can be found in meals served on the Taiwan High Speed Rail, Taiwan Railways Administration, major Taiwanese airlines, as well as highway stops.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 2007, UN FAO statistics indicated that Indians had the lowest rate of meat consumption in the world. Some vegetarians in India have been demanding meat-free supermarkets. In Indian cuisine, vegetarianism is usually synonymous with lacto vegetarianism. Most restaurants in India clearly distinguish themselves as being either "non-vegetarian", "vegetarian", or "pure vegetarian" or "Jain vegetarian" depending upon location, chef/staff, ingredients used and items served. With non-vegetarian and vegetarian being self-explanatory, pure vegetarian refers to hotels run by vegetarian staff, owners subscribing to lacto-vegetarianism including avoidance of indirect animal ingredients like rennet, collagen while Jain vegetarian refers to food subscribing to Jain standards. Some restaurants cater to Eggetarians who are lacto-ovo-vegetarians. Vegetarian restaurants abound, and many vegetarian options are usually available.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Animal-based ingredients (other than milk and honey) such as lard, gelatin, and meat stock are not used in their traditional cuisine. India has devised a system of marking edible products made from only vegetarian ingredients, with a green dot in a square with a green outline. A new mark of a red triangle in a square with a red outline conveys that some animal-based ingredients (meat, egg, etc.) were used, since 2021. Earlier a mark of a red circle in a square with a red outline used to be used. This was replaced due to issues faced by people with colour blindness in distinguishing between the marks. Products like honey, milk, or its direct derivatives are categorized under the green mark.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: It is noted that, in states where vegetarianism is more common, milk consumption is higher and is associated with lactase persistence. This allows people to continue consuming milk into adulthood and obtain proteins that are substituted for meat, fish and eggs in other areas.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Vegetarianism and Hinduism share a deep connection with each other. Hinduism regards eight-six transmigration for a soul to rise devil to a cow, which is a sacred animal in Hinduism, and one more migration the soul becomes a human form. However, people can easily get back to changing their forms of a cow if they fail to free their desires. Cow worship and vegetarianism both result in the idea of transmigration and rebirth in Hinduism. In addition, Hinduism believes that the soul has no beginning and an end, but it is a perpetual cycle through endless rebirth and deaths until the soul can reach the Brahman, the One God. However, only people can attain this status who disconnect from any worldly objects and become free of all cravings and desires. From this aspect of Hinduism, vegetarianism was naturally and smoothly rooted in the cultural cuisine and modest vegetarian diet in India.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to a 2006 "Hindu"-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey, 31% of Indians are vegetarian, while another 9% also consume eggs (ovo-vegetarian). Among the various communities, vegetarianism was most common among the Swaminarayan community, Brahmins, Arya Samaj community, Lingayats, Vaishnavites, Jains, Sikhs and, less frequent among Muslims (3%) and residents of coastal states. However, other surveys cited by FAO and USDA estimate 40% of the Indian population as being vegetarian. These surveys indicate that even Indians who do eat meat, do so infrequently, with less than 30% consuming it regularly, although the reasons are mainly cultural.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A 2018 study from "Economic and Political Weekly" by US-based anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan and India-based economist Suraj Jacob suggests that these numbers could be inflated by social reluctance to admit to meat consumption and estimates that the percentage of vegetarians is likely closer to 20% than 30% overall, with the percentage varying by household income and caste. The study argues that meat-eating behavior is underreported because consumption of meat, especially beef, is "caught in cultural, political, and group identity struggles in India".


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to a 2018 survey released by the registrar general of India, Rajasthan (74.9%), Haryana (69.25%), Punjab (66.75%), and Gujarat (60.95%) have the highest percentage of vegetarians, followed by Madhya Pradesh (50.6%), Uttar Pradesh (47.1%), Maharashtra (40.2%), Delhi (39.5%), Uttarakhand (27.35%), Karnataka (21.1%), Assam (20.6%), Chhattisgarh (17.95%), Bihar (7.55%), Jharkhand (3.25%), Kerala (3.0%), Odisha (2.65%), Tamil Nadu (2.35%), Andhra Pradesh (1.75%), West Bengal (1.4%), and Telangana (1.3%).


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: An official survey conducted by the Government of India, with a sample size of 8858 and the census frame as 2011, indicated India's vegetarian population to be 28–29% of the total population. Compared to a similar survey done in 2004, India's vegetarian population has increased, although according to conflicting data from the National Family Health Survey in 2015–2016 (NFHS), the share of vegetarianism has declined compared to data from 2005 to 2006. Increases in meat consumption in India have been attributed to urbanisation, increasing disposable income, consumerism and cross-cultural influences.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 2022, the National Health and Family Survey (NHFS) released its fifth survey results (2019–2021) which reiterated the hypothesis of a sizeable section of nutrition scholars that the number of Indians who are non-vegetarian has been increasing steadily. It also found significant gender disparities in the consumption of solely vegetarian food.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 2021, Pew Research Center released the results of a survey of over 29,999 Indians throughout the country which included questions on dietary preferences. According to this study, around 39% of the overall Indian population identifies as vegetarian (the survey did not specify a type of vegetarianism and left the definition of the term up to the respondent). In terms of religion, Jains were found to be the most vegetarian at 92%, followed by Sikhs (59%), Hindus (44%), Buddhists (25%), Christians (10%), and finally Muslims (8%). Among Hindus, however, there are wide regional variations with regard to the percentage of people identifying as vegetarian, with 71% of North Indian Hindus identifying as vegetarian, followed by 61% of Central Indians, 57% of West Indians, 30% of South Indians, 19% of Northeast Indians, and 18% of East Indians identifying as vegetarian. There are also caste differences in rates of vegetarianism, with 40% of lower caste Hindus identifying as vegetarian compared to 53% for general category Hindus. Hindus who considered religion very important in their lives identified as vegetarian 46% of the time compared to 33% for those who said it was less important.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Vegetarian diets are categorized as lacto vegetarianism, ovo-lacto vegetarianism, and veganism in general. The reasons for being vegetarian include influence from friends and family members, concern about global warming, health issues and weight management, religion and mercy for animals, in descending order of significance.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Rice, mushrooms, vegetables are some of the dietary staples, mixed with a rich variety of spices, coconut, lime and tamarind. Buddhist Chinese monastics are vegetarians or vegans. Singapore is also the headquarters of the world's first international, vegetarian, fast food chain, VeganBurg. The bigger communities of vegetarians and vegans in Singapore are Vegetarian Society (VSS) and SgVeganCommunity. Vegetarian and vegan places have an active role in the gastronomy of Singapore.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A study by the Israeli Ministry of Health in 2001 found that 7.2% of men and 9.8% of women were vegetarian. Although vegetarianism is quite common, the actual percentage of vegetarians in Israel may be lower—the Israeli food industry estimated it at 5%. In 2010, one study found that 2.6% of Israelis were vegetarians or vegans.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to a 2015 poll by the newspaper "Globes" and Channel 2, 8% of the Israeli population were vegetarians and 5% were vegans. 13% consider turning vegan or vegetarian. Tel Aviv beat out Berlin, New York and Chennai as U.S. food website The Daily Meal's top destination for vegan travelers.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Jewish vegan and vegetarian population has contributed to promotion of meat-free and animal-product-free cultures within Israel through various platforms.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Some argue that the practicing and learning Judaism would lead a person to adopt vegetarianism or veganism.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The definition of vegetarianism throughout Europe is not uniform, creating the potential for products to be labelled inaccurately. Throughout Europe the use of non-vegetarian ingredients are found in products such as beer (isinglass among others), wine (gelatine and crustacean shells among others) and cheese (rennet).


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A study that surveyed 2,436 Belgian individuals found that "21.8% of the respondents believed that meat consumption is unhealthy, and 45.6% of the respondents believed that they should eat less meat." The major reasons persons expressed interest in a more plant-based diet was for taste and health-related reasons. The majority of vegetarians polled think that the meat industry is harmful to the planet, while more than half of the non-vegetarians surveyed disagree with this statement.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In some cities' schools in Finland, the students are offered two options, a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian meal, on four school days a week, and one day a week they have a choice between two vegetarian meals, for grades 1 to 12. In secondary schools and universities, from 10 to 40 percent of the students preferred vegetarian food in 2013. Vegetarianism is most popular in secondary art schools where in some schools over half of the students were vegetarians in 2013.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In France lunches at public schools must contain a "minimum of 20% of meals containing meat and 20% containing fish, and the remainder containing egg, cheese, or offal. However, under a law called "loi Egalim", which passed in 2018 and came into effect in November 2019, all French schools are required to serve at least one meat-free meal a week. In September 2020, 73% of French nurseries and elementary schools offer at least one meat-free meal a week, according to a recent investigation by Greenpeace.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: There has been conflict between vegans and farmers in southern France. A farmers' union known as "Coordination Rurale" advocated for the French to continue eating meat through the slogan "To save a peasant farmer, eat a vegan."


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 2016, Germany was found to have the highest percentage of vegetarians (7.8 million, 10%) and vegans (900,000, 1.1%) in the modern West. A survey from "Forsa" also revealed that approximately 42 million people in Germany identify as flexitarians aka "part time vegetarians". Professionals at the German Official Agencies estimate that by 2020 over 20% of Germans will eat mostly vegetarian. The reason vegetarianism is so prevalent in Germany is not agreed upon, but the movement seems to have experienced much growth from promotion in media and the offering of more non-meat options.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The recorded history of vegetarianism in the country began with the Hungarian Vegetarian Society (HVS), formed in 1883. During this time, vegetarianism was popular because New Age ideas and counter belief systems were favored. In 1911, the first Hungarian vegetarian restaurant opened up in Vámház körút. In the 1950s, the HVS ceased operations and vegetarianism in popular culture diminished. Hungarian vegetarianism was later revived in 1989 with the fall of socialism. The "Ahimsa Hungarian Vegetarian Society of Veszprém" was founded in the late 90s.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to Iceland Monitor in 2016, Iceland had more vegetarian restaurants registered on HappyCow per capita than any other country in Europe.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: While meat and dairy products have traditionally featured prominently Irish diet, vegetarianism and veganism have experienced rapid growth in recent decades. In 2018, a study by Bord Bia, a state agency which seeks to support and promote the country's agriculture industry, found that as many as 5.1% of the Irish population are now vegetarian, and up to 3.5% are vegan. A further 10% were described as some form of flexitarian, meaning that they still consumed some meat and dairy products but sought to minimize the amount of animal products in their diet. Participants identified a range of motivators for their dietary choices, but personal health and wellness and environmental concerns were among the most common factors cited.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: It was reported in 2006 that sales of meat substitutes had an annual growth of around 25%, which made it one of the fastest-growing markets in the Netherlands. In supermarkets and stores, it is sometimes necessary to read the fine print on products in order to make sure that there are no animal-originated ingredients. Increasingly, however, vegetarian products are labeled with the international "V-label", overseen by the Dutch vegetarian association .


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In a late 2019 study published by the environmental organization ("Stichting Nature and Environment"), 59% of Dutch adults (age 16 and up) described themselves as a "meat eater" while 37% responded that they were flexitarians. 43% of respondents claimed that they ate less meat than they did four years earlier. Furthermore, almost half (47%) agreed with or agreed strongly with the statement that eating meat is an outdated practice. In their surveys, 2% identified as vegetarian, 2% as pescetarian and <1% as vegan.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In a March 2020 factsheet published by the ("Dutch Union of Vegetarians"), calculations were made to document the different types of vegetarians. 4–6% of Dutch people (an average of about 860,000) reported they never ate meat. Of this number, 2% called themselves "vegetarian" while some 1% labeled themselves as vegan. The remaining 1–3% was pescetarian.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In July 2020 the estimated the number of vegans in the Netherlands at 150,000. That is approximately 0.9% of the Dutch population.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The capital of Poland, Warsaw, was listed 6th on the list of Top Vegan Cities in the World published by HappyCow in 2019.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 2007, the number of vegetarians in Portugal was estimated at 30,000; which is equal to less than 0.3% of the population. In 2014, the number was estimated to be 200,000 people. Vegan and vegetarian products like soy milk, soy yogurts, rice milk and tofu are widely available in major retailers, and sold across the country. According to HappyCow, Lisbon is the 6th city in the world for number of vegan restaurants per capita, more than any other European city.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Followers of the Romanian Orthodox Church keep fasts during several periods in the ecclesiastical calendar amounting to a majority of the year. In the Romanian Orthodox tradition, devotees keep to a diet without any animal products during these times. As a result, vegan foods are abundant in stores and restaurants; however, Romanians may not be familiar with a vegan or vegetarian diet as a full-time lifestyle choice.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Vegetarianism in Russia first gained prominence in 1901 with the opening of the first vegetarian society in St. Petersburg. Vegetarianism began to largely grow after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russian vegetarians were found to be mainly those who were wealthy and educated.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The number of restaurants and food stores catering exclusively, or partially, to vegetarians and vegans has more than doubled since 2011; with a total of 800 on record by the end of 2016, The Green Revolution claims.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Switzerland has the second highest rate of vegetarianism in the European Union (though in fact Switzerland is not in the EU). Older governmental data from 1997 suggest that 2.3% of the population never eat meat and the observed trend seemed to point towards less meat consumption. Newer studies suggest that the percentage of vegetarians has risen to 5% by 2007. According to a 2020 survey by Swissveg, there were 5.1% vegetarians and 1% vegans.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: The Vegetarian Society was formed in Britain in 1847. In 1944, a faction split from the group to form The Vegan Society.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A 2018 study by comparethemarket.com found that approximately 7% of British people were vegan, while 14% were vegetarian. The results of this study however are questioned by the UK Vegan Society who found that the sample was based on only 2,000 people. According to The Vegan Society's larger survey, the number of vegans quadrupled from 2014 to 2018; in 2018 there were approximately 600,000 vegans in the UK, equivalent to 1.16% of the British population as a whole. As well as this, 31% are eating less meat—either for health or ethical reasons, and 19% are eating fewer dairy products.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A 2021 YouGov survey found 8% of respondents said they followed a plant-based diet, and over a third are interested in becoming vegan.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Participation in Veganuary has become increasingly popular, with the number of people signing up rising each year.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In Canada, vegetarianism is on the rise. A 2018 survey conducted by Dalhousie University researcher Sylvain Charlebois found that 9.4% of Canadian adults considered themselves either vegetarian or vegan. This included 2.3 million vegetarians (7.1% of Canada's population), up from 900,000 15 years prior, and 850,000 vegans (2.3% of Canada's population). As the majority of Canada's vegetarians are under 35, the rate of vegetarianism is expected to continue to rise.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 1971, 1% of U.S. citizens described themselves as vegetarians. In 2009 Harris Interactive found that 3.4% are vegetarian and 0.8% vegan. U.S. vegetarian food sales (dairy replacements such as soy milk and meat replacements such as textured vegetable protein) doubled between 1998 and 2003, reaching $1.6 billion in 2003. In 2015, a Harris Poll National Survey of 2,017 adults aged 18 and over found that eight million Americans, or 3.4%, ate a solely vegetarian diet, and that one million, or 0.4%, ate a strictly vegan diet. A 2018 Gallup poll estimated that 5% of U.S. adults consider themselves to be vegetarians. Older Americans were less likely to be vegetarian with just 2% of adults aged 55 and older saying they follow a vegetarian diet. Younger generations of Americans are more likely to be vegetarian with 7% of 35- to 54-year-olds and 8% of 18- to 34-year-olds following a vegetarian diet.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Many American children whose parents follow vegetarian diets follow them because of religious, environmental or other reasons. In the government's first estimate of how many children avoid meat, the number is about 1 in 200. The CDC survey included children ages 0 to 17 years.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: By U.S. law, food packaging is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, and generally must be labeled with a list of all its ingredients. However, there are exceptions. For example, certain trace ingredients that are "ingredients of ingredients" do not need to be listed.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In Australia, some manufacturers who target the vegetarian market label their foods with the statement "suitable for vegetarians"; however, for foods intended for export to the UK, this labelling can be inconsistent because flavourings in ingredients lists do not need to specify if they come from animal origin. As such, "natural flavour" could be derived from either plant or animal sources.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Animal rights organisations such as Animal Liberation promote vegan and vegetarian diets. "Vegetarian Week" runs from 1–7 October every year, and food companies are taking advantage of the growing number of vegetarians by producing meat-free alternatives of popular dishes, including sausages and mash and spaghetti Bolognese.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: A 2000 Newspoll survey (commissioned by Sanitarium) shows 44% of Australians report eating at least one meat-free evening meal a week, while 18% said they prefer plant-based meals.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Similar to Australia, in New Zealand the term "vegetarian" refers to individuals who eat no animal meat such as pork, chicken, and fish; they may consume animal products such as milk and eggs. In contrast, the term "vegan" is used to describe those who do not eat or use any by-products of animals. In 2002 New Zealand's vegetarians made up a minority of 1–2% of the country's 4.5 million people. By 2011 Roy Morgan Research claimed the number of New Zealanders eating an "all or almost all" vegetarian diet to be 8.1%, growing to 10.3% in 2015 (with men providing the most growth, up 63% from 5.7% to 9.3%). In New Zealand there is a strong enough movement for vegetarianism that it has created significant enough demand for a number of vegetarian and vegan retailers to set up.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: As New Zealand and Australia work together to form common food standards (as seen in the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) and the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code), there is also a lot of ambiguity surrounding the "natural flavour" ingredients.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: According to a Nielsen survey on food preferences from 2016, vegetarians make up 8% and vegans 4% of the population across Latin America, with the highest numbers of both in Mexico.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: In 2004, Marly Winckler, President of the Brazilian Vegetarian Society, claimed that 5% of the population was vegetarian. According to a 2012 survey undertaken by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics, 8% of the population, or 15.2 million people, identified themselves as vegetarian. The city of São Paulo had the most vegetarians in absolute terms (792,120 people), while Fortaleza had the highest percentage, at 14% of the total population. A new survey undertaken by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics in 2018 showed that the proportion of the population identifying as vegetarian grew to 14% (a 75% increase relative to 2012), representing 29 million people. According to the "New York Times", the number of vegetarians in Brazil, the world's largest meat exporter, has nearly doubled in just six years.


title: Vegetarianism by country

text: Marly Winckler claims that the central reasons for the deforestation of the Amazon are expansive livestock raising (mainly cattle) and soybean crops, most of it for use as animal feed, and a minor percentage for edible oil processing (being direct human consumption for use as food nearly negligible), claims that are widely known to have a basis.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. "The Language Instinct" (1994), "How the Mind Works" (1997), "Words and Rules" (2000), "The Blank Slate" (2002), and "The Stuff of Thought" (2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's "The Sense of Style" (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide. Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. "Enlightenment Now" (2018) elaborates this argument by using social science data to show a general improvement of the human condition over recent history brought by reason, science and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is further explored in his next book "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters" (2021).


title: Steven Pinker

text: In 2004, Pinker was named in "Time"s "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in "Foreign Policy"s list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker was also included in "Prospect Magazine's" top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the "American Heritage Dictionary" from 2008 to 2018.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. His grandparents emigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father was a lawyer. His mother eventually became a high-school vice-principal. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored "The Sexual Paradox" and "The Village Effect".


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and then Stanford University.


title: Steven Pinker

text: From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has been serving as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were "Language Learnability and Language Development" (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and "Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure" (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".


title: Steven Pinker

text: In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, "Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language". Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as V → V + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In 1990, Pinker, with Paul Bloom, published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection. The article provided arguments for a continuity based view of language evolution, contrary to then current discontinuity based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of "Homo sapiens" as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity based view was prominently argued by two of the main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould. The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve". The article also presaged Pinker's argument in "The Language Instinct".


title: Steven Pinker

text: In 2007, Pinker gave his expert interpretation as a linguist of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. This opinion was provided to Alan Dershowitz, a personal friend of Pinker's, who was the defense attorney for Jeffrey Epstein, resulting in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped. In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker's 1994 "The Language Instinct" was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages. Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced" by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman. Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book "Words and Things" (1958) was one of the inspirations for "The Language Instinct".


title: Steven Pinker

text: There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition. The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book, "Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate". Sampson argues that "while it may seem attractive to argue the nature side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better support the creativity and nobility of the human mind." Sampson denies there is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.


title: Steven Pinker

text: The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been questioned in Jeffrey Elman's "Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development", which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book "Impossible Minds", the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls "The Language Instinct" excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play."


title: Steven Pinker

text: Two other books, "How the Mind Works" (1997) and "The Blank Slate" (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are genetically adaptive (Pinker is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate around "The Blank Slate", Pinker called Thomas Sowell's book "A Conflict of Visions" "wonderful", and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In "Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language" (1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two. "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book. Critiqueing the book from the perspective of generative linguistics Charles Yang, in the "London Review of Books", writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole". The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes, governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution."


title: Steven Pinker

text: In "The Stuff of Thought" (2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how a mind adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be a spandrel – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. In "How the Mind Works", Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll, experts in music cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition. In his book "This Is Your Brain On Music", Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection, social bonding, and cognitive development; he questions the assumption that music is the antecedent to language, as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker has also been critical of "whole language" reading instruction techniques, stating in "How the Mind Works", "...the dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken] language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim that "reading" is a naturally developing human instinct." In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of "The Language Instinct", Pinker cited "Why Our Children Can't Read" by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted:


title: Steven Pinker

text: One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in "The Language Instinct": the "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called "whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading is not. Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In "The Better Angels of Our Nature", published in 2011, Pinker argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human nature has changed. In his view, it is more likely that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them, the "better angels of our nature". He outlines several "major historical declines of violence" that all have their own socio/cultural/economic causes.<ref name="http://iai.tv/video/the-decline-of-violence"></ref>


title: Steven Pinker

text: Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling. Other aspects drew criticism, including the use of deaths per capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In his seventh popular book, "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" (2014), Pinker attempts to provide a writing style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, because a long time has passed since William Strunk wrote "The Elements of Style" in 1918.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author of "The Diversity Illusion", consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in "The Blank Slate". According to West, the doctrine of "tabula rasa" remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy" a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".


title: Steven Pinker

text: In January 2005 Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers. Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end" may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science. In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor of the proposition that the gender difference in representation in elite universities was "explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias".


title: Steven Pinker

text: In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in "The New York Times". He discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book "The Blank Slate".


title: Steven Pinker

text: In a November 2009 article for "The New York Times" Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays, criticizing his analytical methods. Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In an appearance for BBC World Service's "Exchanges At The Frontier" programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented in "The Better Angels of Our Nature") could have expressed in our biology either through genetic or epigenetic expression. Pinker responded that it was unlikely since "some of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable by biological evolution which has a speed limit measured in generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred in say 50 years". Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to a lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In his 2018 book "Enlightenment Now", Pinker posited that Enlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right. The book received both positive and critical reviews. In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha said that Enlightenment philosophy had immoral consequences such as inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide, and that Pinker downplayed them. Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived the causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that allows anyone to rise above this state."


title: Steven Pinker

text: In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six tweets and a phrase used in his 2011 book. Pinker said that through this letter he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas". Several academics criticized the letter and expressed strong support for Pinker. Conor Friedersdorf, writing in "The Atlantic", criticized the letter for engaging in guilt by association and for creating a "chilling effect" on the speech of non-tenured academics. The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America issued a letter stating that the group "is committed to intellectual freedom and professional responsibility. It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression. Inclusion and civility are crucial to productive scholarly work. And inclusion means hearing (not necessarily accepting) all points of view, even those that may be objectionable to some."


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker was named one of "Time's" 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of "Prospect" and "Foreign Policy"s 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by "Foreign Policy" to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.


title: Steven Pinker

text: His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, Simon Fraser University and the University of Tromsø. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.


title: Steven Pinker

text: Pinker has served on the editorial boards of journals such as "Cognition", "Daedalus", and "PLOS One", and on the advisory boards of institutions for scientific research (e.g., the Allen Institute for Brain Science), free speech (e.g., the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the popularization of science (e.g., the World Science Festival and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), peace (e.g., the Peace Research Endowment), and secular humanism (e.g., the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Secular Coalition for America).


title: Steven Pinker

text: From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, published in 2011.


title: Steven Pinker

text: In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study", was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the "Annals of Improbable Research".


title: The Verve

text: The Verve were an English rock band formed in Wigan in 1990 by lead vocalist Richard Ashcroft, guitarist Nick McCabe, bass guitarist Simon Jones and drummer Peter Salisbury. Guitarist and keyboard player Simon Tong later became a member in their first reunion only.


title: The Verve

text: Beginning with a psychedelic sound with their debut LP "A Storm in Heaven", by the mid-1990s the band had released several EPs and four albums. They also endured name and line-up changes, break-ups, health problems, drug abuse and various lawsuits. The band's commercial breakthrough was the 1997 album "Urban Hymns", one of the best-selling albums in UK history. It features the hit singles "Bitter Sweet Symphony", "The Drugs Don't Work", "Sonnet" and "Lucky Man". In 1998, the band won two Brit Awards, winning Best British Group, appeared on the cover of "Rolling Stone" in March, and in February 1999, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song.


title: The Verve

text: Soon after their commercial peak, The Verve disbanded in April 1999, citing internal conflicts. According to "Billboard" magazine, "the group's rise was the culmination of a long, arduous journey that began at the dawn of the decade and went on to encompass a major breakup, multiple lawsuits, and an extensive diet of narcotics". During an eight-year split, Ashcroft dismissed talk of a reunion, saying: "You're more likely to get all four Beatles on stage." The band's original line-up reunited in June 2007, embarking on a tour later that year and releasing the album "Forth" in August 2008, which spawned the hit single "Love Is Noise". Amid revived tensions, the band broke up for the third time in 2008 following their performance at V Festival.


title: The Verve

text: The founding members of the Verve met at Winstanley Sixth Form College, in Wigan, Greater Manchester, when Liam Begley introduced Richard Ashcroft to the other band members. The band was initially known as just "Verve", and their first gig was at a friend's 18th birthday party at the Honeysuckle Inn, in Wigan, on 15 August 1990. Most of the band's early material was created through extensive jam sessions. Fronted by Ashcroft, the band caused a buzz in early 1991 for their ability to captivate audiences with their musical textures and avant-garde sensibilities.


title: The Verve

text: The group were signed by Hut Records in 1991 and their first studio releases in 1992, "All in the Mind", "She's a Superstar", and "Gravity Grave" (along with the December 1992 EP "Verve") saw the band become a critical success, making an impression with freeform guitar work by McCabe and unpredictable vocals by Ashcroft. Those first three singles reached the first spot in the UK Indie charts, and "She's a Superstar" entered the UK Top 75 Singles Chart. The band saw some support from these early days in the United States in some music scenes in big cities like New York connected with psychedelic music.


title: The Verve

text: 1993's "A Storm in Heaven" was the band's full-length debut, produced by record producer John Leckie. "Blue" was released as the lead single and again managed to enter in the UK Top 75 at No. 69 and reached No. 2 in the Indie charts. The album was a critical success, but was only a moderate commercial success, reaching No. 27 in the UK album chart that summer. The second single from the album, "Slide Away", topped the UK indie rock charts. During this period the band played a number of gigs with Oasis who, at the time, were relatively unknown. Furthermore, the band supported The Smashing Pumpkins on the European Part of their Siamese Dream Tour in autumn of 1993.


title: The Verve

text: In 1994, the band released the album "No Come Down", a compilation of B-sides plus a live version of "Gravity Grave" performed at Glastonbury Festival in 1993. It was the band's first release under the name "The Verve", following legal difficulties with jazz label Verve Records. The band then played on the travelling US alternative rock festival, Lollapalooza, in the summer of 1994. A new mix of "Blue" was released in the US to promote the band. The tour became notorious for the events of 11 July – Ashcroft was hospitalised for dehydration after a massive session of drinking and Salisbury was arrested for destroying a hotel room in Kansas in a drug-fuelled delirium. However, the band were performing again the very next day. Ashcroft later recalled: "At the start, it was an adventure, but America nearly killed us."


title: The Verve

text: The Verve's physical and mental turmoil continued into the chaotic recording sessions of their second album, 1995's "A Northern Soul", produced by Owen Morris. The band departed from the experimental psychedelic sounds of "A Storm in Heaven" and focused more on conventional alternative rock, with Ashcroft's vocals taking a more prominent role in the songs, although reminiscent of some of the early work. Around this period, Oasis guitarist and friend of Ashcroft, Noel Gallagher, dedicated the song "Cast No Shadow" on the album "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" to Ashcroft, who returned the gesture by dedicating the song "A Northern Soul" to Gallagher.


title: The Verve

text: The band released the album's first single "This Is Music" in May, and it reached No. 35, their first single to reach the Top 40. It was followed by "On Your Own" in June which performed even better, reaching No. 28. This single was particularly new for the Verve as it was a soulful ballad. The album reached the UK Top 20 upon its release in July, but Ashcroft broke up the band three months later, just before the release of the third single "History", which reached No. 24 in September. Ashcroft later stated: "I knew that I had to do it earlier on, but I just wouldn't face it. Once you're not happy in anything, there's no point living in it, is there? But my addiction to playing and writing and being in this band was so great that I wouldn't do anything about it. It felt awful because it could have been the greatest time of our lives, with "History" doing well, but I still think I can look myself in the mirror in 30 years time and say, 'Yeah man, you did the right thing.' The others had been through the same thing. It was a mixture of sadness and regret, and relief that we would have some time away."


title: The Verve

text: Ashcroft reunited with Jones and Salisbury just a few weeks after the break-up, but McCabe did not rejoin them. The new band hired former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, but he spent only a couple of days with the band. The band then chose Simon Tong, a school friend credited with originally teaching Ashcroft and Jones to play guitar. The band made no live appearances in 1996, apart from a solo performance from Ashcroft supporting Oasis in New York; the year was spent playing and recording songs for a new album.


title: The Verve

text: In early 1997, Ashcroft asked McCabe to return, saying: "I got to the point where nothing other than The Verve would do for me." McCabe obliged and with the new line-up in place (Tong remained on guitar alongside McCabe), the group went through a "spiritual" recording process to finish their third album, "Urban Hymns."


title: The Verve

text: For the first time, the Verve achieved commercial success with their new material. The first single, "Bitter Sweet Symphony", entered the UK charts at number 2 in June 1997. The BBC wrote that it "became one of the anthems of the year" and was "became almost inescapable" after it was used in a television car advert.


title: The Verve

text: The music video, which received heavy rotation on MTV, sees Ashcroft walking down a busy London pavement, oblivious to what is going on around and refusing to change his stride or direction. The song is based on a sample from a 1965 version of the Rolling Stones' song "The Last Time" by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra; Allen Klein, who owned the copyright, refused clearance for the sample, and took control of the songwriting credits and royalties.


title: The Verve

text: In August 1997, The Verve began playing their first gigs in two years, beginning the Urban Hymns Tour. The next single, "The Drugs Don't Work", gave the band their first UK number one in September. "Urban Hymns" reached number one on the UK Albums Chart that month, knocking off Oasis' highly anticipated album "Be Here Now". The Verve saw an overwhelming increase in popularity overseas; it reached the US top 30, going platinum in the process, and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" reached number 12 on the US charts, their highest ever American position. Critic Mike Gee of "iZINE" said of this time that the Verve "had become the greatest band in the world. ...The Verve were no longer the question mark or the cliché. They were the statement and the definition." By November the band released "Lucky Man" in the UK and reached number 7. At the 1998 Brit Awards, The Verve won the awards for Best British Group and Best British Album ("Urban Hymns"). The band's singles were given extensive airplay on US rock stations and Ashcroft, and bandmates, appeared on the cover of "Rolling Stone" magazine in March 1998. Then, as the band was on a successful tour to promote the album, Jones collapsed on stage. This was the first of many problems to come for the band in the next months. In 1998, McCabe, Tong, Jones and drummer Leon Parr formerly with Mr. So & So and Mosque were commissioned for a soundtrack for a Jonny Lee Miller film which was recorded in Kilburn. These never made it to the final film due to delays on their part. At the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was nominated for Video of the Year, Best Group Video, and Best Alternative Video.


title: The Verve

text: On 24 May 1998, The Verve played a homecoming concert in front of 33,000 fans in the grounds of Haigh Hall & Country Park, Aspull, supported by Beck and John Martyn. The band then played gigs in mainland Europe, but, on 7 June, a post-show fight at Düsseldorf-Philipshalle left McCabe with a broken hand and Ashcroft with a sore jaw. After this, McCabe decided he could not tolerate the pressures of life on the road any longer and pulled out of the tour, leaving the band's future in jeopardy, with rumours of a split circulating in the press. The band continued with session musician B. J. Cole replacing McCabe, whose guitar work was also sampled and triggered on stage. The band played another American tour, which was riddled with problems as venues were downsized and support act Massive Attack dropped out. The band returned to England for two headline performances at V Festival, which received poor reviews; "NME" wrote that "where songs used to spiral upwards and outwards, they now simply fizzle tamely". The Verve played their last gig at Slane Castle in Ireland on 29 August. A long period of inactivity followed. In February 1999, "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. Finally, in April 1999, it was announced that The Verve had again split up.


title: The Verve

text: By the time The Verve had split, Ashcroft was already working on solo material accompanied by, among others, Salisbury and Cole. In 2000, he released his first solo album, "Alone with Everybody", which reached number 1 in the UK album charts. Ashcroft's next album, "Human Conditions", was released to poorer sales in 2002, and Ashcroft was subsequently absent from the music business for several years. During this time Salisbury was the drummer for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's UK tour in 2004, after their original drummer briefly left due to alcohol and drug abuse. Salisbury also owns a drum shop in Stockport. Ashcroft appeared with Coldplay at Live 8 in 2005, followed by the release of "Keys to the World" in 2006 and a particularly successful tour that included gigs as the support act for Coldplay's Twisted Logic Tour.


title: The Verve

text: Jones and Tong formed The Shining, who released one album, before disbanding in 2003. Jones went on to work with Irish musician Cathy Davey. Tong became a live replacement for ex-guitarist Graham Coxon in Blur, an additional guitarist for Gorillaz (both Jones and Tong played guitar for "Demon Days Live"), and a member of The Good, the Bad & the Queen. McCabe worked in different projects like the London-based Neotropic project and played with some established artists, including John Martyn, The Music, The Beta Band and Faultline.


title: The Verve

text: The former members sometimes expressed bitter sentiments about the band's later years. In his only interview after the split, McCabe said of "Urban Hymns": "By the time I got my parts in there it's not really a music fan's record. It just sits nicely next to the Oasis record." During his solo career, Ashcroft expressed regret at having asked McCabe to return for the album instead of releasing it under his own name, saying: "Imagine being the guy that's written an album on his own, bottles it near the end, feels like there's unfinished business, rings Nick McCabe up who adds some guitars, puts it out as the Verve and the same problems arise again. Imagine being that mug. I've now got to rewrite history. Everyone thinks those songs are somehow associated with another bunch of people that I'm not with now." Jones claimed that "The Verve were going off in a direction of strings and ballads, and that's not where I was coming from at all. Loud guitars is it for me", though noting that this was not why the band split up.


title: The Verve

text: Ashcroft had been adamant that The Verve would not re-form, once remarking: "You're more likely to get all four Beatles on stage". However, after Ashcroft learned that Salisbury was in contact with McCabe over a possible side project, Ashcroft contacted McCabe and Jones, making peace with them, and the band re-formed. Tong was not asked to rejoin, so as to keep the internal issues that split the band up a decade ago to an absolute minimum. Jones explained this decision by stating: "It would have been too hard, it's hard enough for the four of us. If you bring more people to it, it's harder to communicate and communication has always been our difficulty". Paradoxically, Nick McCabe would state years later on his Twitter account, that he intended to include Davide Rossi (violist) as a new member of the group. On 26 June 2007, the band's reunion was announced by Jo Whiley on BBC Radio 1. The band, reuniting in their original line-up, announced they would tour in November 2007, and release an album in 2008. The band stated: "We are getting back together for the joy of music", though they turned down a multi-album deal offer "because the 'treadmill' of releasing albums and touring marked the beginning of the end for the band a decade ago".


title: The Verve

text: Tickets for their six-gig tour in early November 2007 sold out in less than 20 minutes. The tour began in Glasgow on 2 November, and included 6 performances at the Carling Academy Glasgow, The Empress Ballroom and the London Roundhouse. Since the 6-gig tour went extremely well in sales, the band booked a second, bigger tour for December. They played at O2 arena, the SECC in Glasgow, the Odyssey in Belfast, the Nottingham Arena and Manchester Central. Each show from the first and second part of the tour were sold out immediately. The band continued touring in 2008. They played at most of the biggest summer festivals and a few headline shows all over North America, Europe, Japan and the UK between April and August. Including shows at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, also at the Madison Square Garden Theater, and the Pinkpop festival, Glastonbury Festival, T in the Park, the V Festival, Oxegen Festival, Rock Werchter, Rock am Ring and Rock im Park and The Eden Project Sessions.


title: The Verve

text: New single "Love Is Noise" was premiered by Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 on 23 June. They performed at the coveted Sunday night slot on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on 29 June, closing the show with the new song. The Verve released a free download of a non-album track, "Mover", on 30 June. The song had been performed by the band in 1994, but had never seen a proper recording until the reunion. The track was available for download from their official website for one week only.


title: The Verve

text: The band announced the new album's title: "Forth", which was released in the UK on 25 August and the following day in North America. The album reached No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart on 31 August. The lead single "Love Is Noise" was released in the UK on 3 August digitally and one week later (11 August) on its physical form, peaking at No. 4 in the UK. The song was a moderate success in Europe, charting at No. 16 in the European chart (with 6 weeks in the Top 20). "Rather Be", the second single from the album, was released in November but did not become as successful as "Love Is Noise" was, peaking at number 56 on the UK Singles Chart.


title: The Verve

text: In August 2009, "The Guardian" speculated that The Verve had broken up for a third time, with Jones and McCabe no longer on speaking terms with Ashcroft as they felt he was using the reunion as a vehicle to get his solo career back on track. Being asked about the supposed split, Ashcroft told "The Daily Telegraph", "I can confirm we did what we set out to do [...] Right now there are no plans to be doing anything in the near future."


title: The Verve

text: McCabe, Jones, the electric violinist and arranger Davide Rossi (who also served as a touring musician of the Verve) and the drummer Mig Schillace started a new band, The Black Ships, who later changed their name to Black Submarine. In September 2017, McCabe said he had not spoken to Ashcroft for over a year and that a possible reunion would be unlikely in the foreseeable future. That year also saw the release of the 20th-anniversary version of "Urban Hymns".


title: The Verve

text: In April 2019, the Rolling Stones agreed to return the royalties and songwriting credits for "Bitter Sweet Symphony" to Ashcroft. Ashcroft announced the agreement in May, when he received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors. He said it was a "kind and magnanimous" move, and said: "I never had a personal beef with the Stones. They've always been the greatest rock and roll band in the world. It's been a fantastic development. It's life-affirming in a way."


title: The Verve

text: | rowspan="2" | 1999 || rowspan="2" | "Bitter Sweet Symphony" || Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal ||


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: In astrology, a planet's domicile (or less commonly house, not to be confused with the astrological house system) is the zodiac sign over which it has rulership. This is a separate concept from the houses of the horoscope. A planetary ruler is given to each sign, over which the planet is said to have a more powerful influence when positioned therein. The ruling planet associated with a sign is also used as an implied focus of interpretation for the signs on house cusps in a chart. A planet is considered to be in domal dignity when it is positioned in the sign it rules. This is the strongest of the five essential dignities of a planet.


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: The assignments of the ruling planets appear to be based upon the Northern Hemisphere seasons, as the sun (Sol) and the moon, the principal bearers of light and heat, were awarded to Leo and Cancer, respectively, since the months the sun passed through these signs (in ancient times) were the west and had the longest days.


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: Conversely, Saturn, the most distant (and hence the "coldest") of the planets known to ancients, was accorded the rulership of Aquarius and Capricorn, the signs opposite Leo and Cancer, respectively.


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: Jupiter, being next farthest away, was given the signs on either side of Aquarius and Capricorn (Pisces and Sagittarius), and Mars, next in order, received the next two (Aries and Scorpio).


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: Since Mercury never appears more than one sign from the sun in either direction, it was deemed to rule the two signs on either side of Leo and Cancer (Virgo and Gemini), and since Venus can never be found more than two signs from the Sun, it obtained the rulership of Libra and Taurus.


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: The discovery of planets outside of the geocentric field of vision in modern times provided a dilemma for astrologers, which most eventually resolved by a consensus declaring Uranus to be Aquarius' ruling planet while assigning Neptune to Pisces and later, Pluto, considered the higher octave of Mars, was given to Scorpio.


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: Some modern authorities use the concept of "night rulerships" to find room for additional dignities. Uranus was designated the day ruler of Aquarius while Saturn was to be its night ruler. Similarly, Neptune was the day ruler of Pisces, leaving Jupiter as the night ruler, and Pluto was the day ruler of Scorpio with Mars as the night ruler. This notion probably had its origin in the concept of astrological sect, but this was the only vestige of the sect in the modern tradition. Unfortunately, no allowance was made for these modern suggestions in the complex traditional doctrine of essential dignities, but the idea was very popular.


title: Domicile (astrology)

text: The use of dual rulerships in a manner such as this was also be known as "co-rulership". Some astrologers believed that the new co-rulers were primary rulers of the signs with which they were associated and might have been sole rulers of those signs, and if that was the case, two other planets, one linked to Libra or Taurus, and the other to Virgo or Gemini, may await discovery, thus eliminating the need for dual rulership of a sign. Although the status of Ceres has not been conclusively decided at the moment in astrology, it has been suggested as the ruler of Virgo or Taurus. For some modern astrologers including many European astrologers, it is the ruling planet of Virgo based upon observation of its role in synastric charts. Significantly, the generation of astrologers who first encountered Ceres in the early 19th century after its discovery, before its demotion to an asteroid in the middle of the 19th century, assigned it rulership of Virgo. For a minority of astrologers, it is the ruling planet of Taurus along with Venus. The possibility exists that it isn't involved with any sign, but in any event, it can almost definitely be attributed to the Earth element.