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

Revenge of the Nerds 167molecules, everything we have learned in biology has come from anunderstanding, implicit or explicit, that the organized complexity of anorganism is in the service of its survival and reproduction. This includeswhat we have learned about the nonadaptive by-products, because theycan be found only in the course of a search for the adaptations. It is thebald claim that a feature is a lucky product of drift or of some poorlyunderstood dynamic that is untestable and post hoc.Often I have heard it said that animals are not well engineered afterall. Natural selection is hobbled by shortsightedness, the dead hand ofthe past, and crippling constraints on what kinds of structures are biologicallyand physically possible. Unlike a human engineer, selection isincapable of good design. Animals are clunking jalopies saddled withancestral junk and occasionally blunder into barely serviceable solutions.People are so eager to believe this claim that they seldom think itthrough or check the facts. Where do we find this miraculous humanengineer who is not constrained by availability of parts, manufacturingpracticality, and the laws of physics? Of course, natural selection doesnot have the foresight of engineers, but that cuts both ways: it does nothave their mental blocks, impoverished imagination, or conformity tobourgeois sensibilities and ruling-class interests, either. Guided only bywhat works, selection can home in on brilliant, creative solutions. Formillennia, biologists have discovered to their astonishment and delightthe ingenious contrivances of the living world: the biomechanical perfectionof cheetahs, the infrared pinhole cameras of snakes, the sonar ofbats, the superglue of barnacles, the steel-strong silk of spiders, thedozens of grips of the human hand, the DNA repair machinery in allcomplex organisms. After all, entropy and more malevolent forces likepredators and parasites are constantly gnawing at an organism's right tolife and do not forgive slapdash engineering.And many of the examples of bad design in the animal kingdom turnout to be old spouses' tales. Take the remark in a book by a famous cognitivepsychologist that natural selection has been powerless to eliminatethe wings of any bird, which is why penguins are stuck with wings eventhough they cannot fly. Wrong twice. The moa had no trace of a wing, andpenguins do use their wings to fly—under water. Michael French makesthe point in his engineering textbook using a more famous example:It is an old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, a jokewhich does grave injustice to a splendid creature and altogether too