Harvard professor Stephen Pinker attacked by 550 academics for tweets dating back to 2014

A Harvard professor and celebrated intellectual whose most recent book was described by Bill Gates as “my new favorite book of all time” has become the latest target in America's "culture wars".

Steven Pinker, 65, a cognitive psychologist and popular science author, has been accused of playing down concerns about racial justice and sexism.

More than 550 academics have signed a letter seeking to remove him from the list of “distinguished fellows” of the Linguistic Society of America.

They gave as evidence six of his tweets dating back to 2014, and his 2011 description of a man who shot four muggers as "mild mannered".

“Dr Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes,” their letter stated.

The society’s executive committee declined to remove him last week, stating: “It is not the mission of the society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression.”

The move to condemn Dr Pinker came after 153 intellectuals and writers, among them JK Rowling, Fareed Zakaria, and Malcolm Gladwell, signed a letter in Harper’s Magazine that criticised the current intellectual climate, describing it as "cancel culture" and “intolerant.”

Their letter sparked a fiery response from opposing liberal and leftist writers, who accused the Harper’s letter writers of elitism and hypocrisy.

Dr Pinker donated heavily to Barack Obama, but he has denounced what he sees as the close-mindedness of heavily liberal American universities.

The Montreal-born professor relishes intellectual debate, posing provocative questions over the innate differences between the sexes and among different ethnic and racial groups.

He has also suggested that the political Left’s insistence that certain subjects are off limits contributed to the rise of the alt-Right.

“I have a mind-set that the world is a complex place we are trying to understand,” he told The New York Times. “There is an inherent value to free speech, because no one knows the solution to problems a priori.”

He described his critics as “speech police” who “have trolled through my writings to find offensive lines and adjectives.”

One tweet singled out was a 2015 comment that the number of police shootings of black people could be due to police having disproportionately high numbers of encounters with black residents in deprived communities.

“Data: Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately,” he tweeted, with a link to an article. “Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings.”

Another complaint was that Dr Pinker in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, described a man who shot four young muggers in the New York subway in the 1970s as "mild mannered".

He wrote "Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car."

The letter against him states: "Once again, the language Dr Pinker employs in calling this person “mild-mannered” illustrates his tendency to downplay very real violence."

He suggested that underrepresentation in the sciences could be rooted in part in biological differences between men and women.

In 2007, he provided his expertise on language for the 2007 defense of Jeffrey Epstein on sex trafficking charges, at the request of his friend Alan Dershowitz - Epstein's lawyer.

Dr Pinker has said he regrets getting involved. John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor of English and linguistics, said the row was "depressing".

“Steve is too big for this kerfuffle to affect him,” he said. “But it’s depressing that an erudite and reasonable scholar is seen by a lot of intelligent people as an undercover monster.”