Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Thinking Machines 117should cast identical twins in tales of jealousy and betrayal of truly gothicproportions. In fact, nothing happens. The spouse of one identical twinfeels no romantic attraction toward the other twin. Love locks our feelingsin to another person as that person, not as a kind of person, no matterhow narrow the kind.On March 10, 1988, someone bit off half the ear of Officer David J.Storton. No one doubts who did it: either Shawn Blick, a twenty-oneyear-oldman living in Palo Alto, California, or Jonathan Blick, his identicaltwin brother. Both were scuffling with the officer, and one of thembit off part of his ear. Both were charged with mayhem, attempted burglary,assaulting a police officer, and aggravated mayhem. The aggravatedmayhem charge, for the ear biting, carries a life sentence. Officer Stortontestified that one of the twins had short hair and the other long, andit was the long-haired man who bit him. Unfortunately, by the time themen surrendered three days later they sported identical crew cuts andweren't talking. Their lawyers argued that neither one could be given thesevere sentence for aggravated mayhem. For each brother there is a reasonabledoubt as to whether he did it, because it could have been theother. The argument is compelling because our sense of justice picks outthe individual who did a deed, not the characteristics of that individual.Our obsession with individual personhood is not an inexplicablequirk, but probably evolved because every human being we meet, quiteapart from any property we can observe, is guaranteed to house anunreplicable collection of memories and desires owing to a uniqueembryological and biographical history. In Chapter 6, when we reverseengineerthe sense of justice and the emotion of romantic love, we willsee that the mental act of registering individual persons is at the heart oftheir design.Human beings are not the only class of confusable individuals wehave to keep distinct; a shell game is another real-life example. Manyanimals have to play shell games and thus keep track of individuals. Oneexample is the mother who has to track her offspring, which may looklike everyone else's but invisibly carries her genes. Another is the predatorof herding animals, who has to track one member of the herd, followingthe tag-in-the-swimming-pool strategy: if you're "It," don't switchquarries, giving everyone but yourself time to catch their breath. Whenzoologists in Kenya tried to make their data collection easier by colorcodingthe horns of wildebeests they had tranquilized, they found thatno matter how carefully they restored the marked animal to vigor before