How the Mind Works - michaeljgoodnight.com

Standard Equipment 37
natural selection of replicators, the only nonmiraculous natural process
we know of that can manufacture well-functioning machines. The organism
appears as if it was designed to see well now because it owes its existence
to the success of its ancestors in seeing well in the past. (This
point will be expanded in Chapter 3.)
Many people acknowledge that natural selection is the artificer of the
body but draw the line when it comes to the human mind. The mind,
they say, is a by-product of a mutation that enlarged the head, or is a
clumsy programmer's hack, or was given its shape by cultural rather than
biological evolution. Tooby and Cosmides point out a delicious irony.
The eye, that most uncontroversial example of fine engineering by natural
selection, is not just any old organ that can be sequestered with
flesh and bone, far away from the land of the mental. It doesn't digest
food or, except in the case of Superman, change anything in the physical
world. What does the eye do? The eye is an organ of information processing,
firmly connected to—anatomically speaking, a part of—the
brain. And all those delicate optics and intricate circuits in the retina do
not dump information into a yawning empty orifice or span some Cartesian
chasm from a physical to a mental realm. The receiver of this richly
structured message must be every bit as well engineered as the sender.
As we have seen in comparing human vision and robot vision, the parts
of the mind that allow us to see are indeed well engineered, and there is
no reason to think that the quality of engineering progressively deteriorates
as the information flows upstream to the faculties that interpret
and act on what we see.
The adaptationist program in biology, or the careful use of natural
selection to reverse-engineer the parts of an organism, is sometimes
ridiculed as an empty exercise in after-the-fact storytelling. In the satire
of the syndicated columnist Cecil Adams, "the reason our hair is brown
is that it enabled our monkey ancestors to hide amongst the coconuts."
Admittedly, there is no shortage of bad evolutionary "explanations." Why
do men avoid asking for directions? Because our male ancestors might
have been killed if they approached a stranger. What purpose does music
serve? It brings the community together. Why did happiness evolve?
Because happy people are pleasant to be around, so they attracted more
allies. What is the function of humor? To relieve tension. Why do people
overestimate their chance of surviving an illness? Because it helps them
to operate effectively in life.
These musings strike us as glib and lame, but it is not because they