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

174 HOW THE MIND WORKSAnd most important, attributing adaptive complexity to naturalselection is not just a recognition of design excellence, like the expensiveappliances in the Museum of Modern Art. Natural selection is afalsifiable hypothesis about the origin of design and imposes onerousempirical requirements. Remember how it works: from competitionamong replicators. Anything that showed signs of design but did notcome from a long line of replicators could not be explained by—in fact,would refute—the theory of natural selection: natural species thatlacked reproductive organs, insects growing like crystals out of rocks,television sets on the moon, eyes spewing out of vents on the oceanfloor, caves shaped like hotel rooms down to the details of hangers andice buckets. Moreover, the beneficial functions all have to be in the ultimateservice of reproduction. An organ can be designed for sieeing oreating or mating or nursing, but it had better not be designed for thebeauty of nature, the harmony of the ecosystem, or instant self-destruction.Finally, the beneficiary of the function has to be the replicator.Darwin pointed out that if horses had evolved saddles, his theory wouldimmediately be falsified.Rumors and folklore notwithstanding, natural selection remainsthe heart of explanation in biology. Organisms can be understood onlyas interactions among adaptations, by-products of adaptations, andnoise. The by-products and noise don't rule out the adaptations, nordo they leave us staring blankly, unable to tell them apart. It is exactlywhat makes organisms so fascinating—their improbable adaptivedesign—that calls for reverse-engineering them in the light of naturalselection. The by-products and noise, because they are defined negativelyas un-adaptations, also can be discovered only via reverse-engineering.This is no less true for human intelligence. The major faculties of themind, with their feats no robot can duplicate, show the handiwork ofselection. That does not mean that every aspect of the mind is adaptive.From low-level features like the sluggishness and noisiness of neurons,to momentous activities like art, music, religion, and dreams, we shouldexpect to find activities of the mind that are not adaptations in the biologists'sense. But it does mean that our understanding of how the mindworks will be woefully incomplete or downright wrong unless it mesheswith our understanding of how the mind evolved. That is the topic of therest of the chapter.