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

162 HOW THE MIND WORKSmachines, and their "complexity" is functional, adaptive design: complexityin the service of accomplishing some interesting outcome. The digestivetract is not just patterned; it is patterned as a factory line forextracting nutrients from ingested tissues. No set of equations applicableto everything from galaxies to Bosnia can explain why teeth are found inthe mouth rather than in the ear. And since organisms are collections ofdigestive tracts, eyes, and other systems organized to attain goals, generallaws of complex systems will not suffice. Matter simply does not have aninnate tendency to organize itself into broccoli, wombats, and ladybugs.Natural selection remains the only theory that explains how adaptivecomplexity, not just any old complexity, can arise, because it isf the onlynonmiraculous, forward-direction theory in which how well somethingworks plays a causal role in how it came to be.-Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept naturalselection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there wereno evidence for it. Thankfully, the evidence is overwhelming. I don't justmean evidence that life evolved (which is way beyond reasonable doubt,creationists notwithstanding), but that it evolved by natural selection.Darwin himself pointed to the power of selective breeding, a direct analogueof natural selection, in shaping organisms. For example, the differencesamong dogs—Chihuahuas, greyhounds, Scotties, Saint Bernards,shar-peis—come from selective breeding of wolves for only a few thousandyears. In breeding stations, laboratories, and seed company greenhouses,artificial selection has produced catalogues of wonderful neworganisms befitting Dr. Seuss.Natural selection is also readily observable in the wild. In a classicexample, the white peppered moth gave way in nineteenth-century Manchesterto a dark mutant form after industrial soot covered the lichen onwhich the moth rested, making the white form conspicuous to birds.When air pollution laws lightened the lichen in the 1950s, the then-rarewhite form reasserted itself. There are many other examples, perhaps themost pleasing coming from the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant. Darwinwas inspired to the theory of natural selection in part by the thirteenspecies of finches on the Galapagos islands. They clearly were related toa species on the South American mainland, but differed from tlhem and