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

156 | HOW THE MIND WORKSfood, or catch prey, or manufacture honey or silk or wood or poison.These are rare accomplishments, beyond the means of puddles, rocks,clouds, and other nonliving things. We would call a heap of extraterrestrialmatter "life" only if it achieved comparable feats.Rare accomplishments come from special structures. Animals can seeand rocks can't because animals have eyes, and eyes have precisearrangements of unusual materials capable of forming an image: a corneathat focuses light, a lens that adjusts the focus to the object's depth, aniris that opens and closes to let in the right amount of light, a sphere oftransparent jelly that maintains the eyes shape, a retina at the focalplane of the lens, muscles that aim the eyes up-and-down, side-to-side,and in-and-out, rods and cones that transduce light into neural signals,and more, all exquisitely shaped and arranged. The odds are mind-bogglinglystacked against these structures' being assembled out of rawmaterials by tornados, landslides, waterfalls, or the lightning bolt vaporizingswamp goo in the philosopher's thought experiment.The eye has so many parts, arranged so precisely, that it appears tohave been designed in advance with the goal of putting together somethingthat sees. The same is true for our other organs. Our joints arelubricated to pivot smoothly, our teeth meet to sheer and grind, ourhearts pump blood—every organ seems to have been designed with afunction in mind. One of the reasons God was invented was to be themind that formed and executed life's plans. The laws of the world workforwards, not backwards: rain causes the ground to be wet; the ground'sbenefiting from being wet cannot cause the rain. What else but the plansof God could effect the teleology (goal-directedness) of life on earth?Darwin showed what else. He identified a forward-causation physicalprocess that mimics the paradoxical appearance of backward causationor teleology. The trick is replication. A replicator is something that canmake a copy of itself, with most of its traits duplicated in the copy,including the ability to replicate in turn. Consider two states of affairs, Aand B. B can't cause A if A comes first. (Seeing weft can't cause an eye tohave a clear lens.)has clear ^^- seeslenswell(A)(B)* , :i : i