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

Revenge of the Nerds 165I have reviewed the modern case for the theory of natural selectionbecause so many people are hostile to it. I don't mean fundamentalistsfrom the Bible Belt, but professors at America's most distinguished universitiesfrom coast to coast. Time and again I have heard the objections:the theory is circular, what good is half an eye, how can structure arisefrom random mutation, there hasn't been enough time, Gould has disprovedit, complexity just emerges, physics will make it obsolete someday.People desperately want Darwinism to be wrong. Dennett's diagnosisin Darwin's Dangerous Idea is that natural selection implies there is noplan to the universe, including human nature. No doubt that is a reason,though another is that people who study the mind would rather not haveto think about how it evolved because it would make a hash of cherishedtheories. Various scholars have claimed that the mind is innatelyequipped with fifty thousand concepts (including "carburetor" and"trombone"), that capacity limitations prevent the human brain fromsolving problems that are routinely solved by bees, that language isdesigned for beauty rather than for use, that tribal people kill their babiesto protect the ecosystem from human overpopulation, that children harboran unconscious wish to copulate with their parents, and that peoplecould just as easily be conditioned to enjoy the thought of their spousebeing unfaithful as to be upset by the thought. When advised that theseclaims are evolutionarily improbable, they attack the theory of evolutionrather than rethinking the claim. The efforts that academics have madeto impugn Darwinism are truly remarkable.One claim is that reverse-engineering, the attempt to discover thefunctions of organs (which I am arguing should be done to the humanmind), is a symptom of a disease called "adaptationism." Apparently if youbelieve that any aspect of an organism has a function, you absolutely mustbelieve that every aspect has a function, that monkeys are brown to hideamongst the coconuts. The geneticist Richard Lewontin, for example, hasdefined adaptationism as "that approach to evolutionary studies whichassumes without further proof that all aspects of the morphology, physiologyand behavior of organisms are adaptive optimal solutions to problems."Needless to say, there is no such madman. A sane person canbelieve that a complex organ is an adaptation, that is, a product of naturalselection, while also believing that features of an organism that are not