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

Revenge of the Nerds 187mals. They are bipedal. They live longer than other apes, and bear helplessoffspring who stay children (that is, sexually immature) for a substantialpart of their lives. Hunting is important, and meat a large part ofthe diet. Males invest in their offspring: they tote children around, protectthem against animals and other humans, and give them food. And asThe Devil's •Dictionary points out, humans occupy every ecozone onearth.Aside from the retooling of the skeleton that gives us upright postureand precision manipulation, what makes us unusual is not our body butour behavior and the mental programs that organize it. In the comic stripCalvin and Hobbes, Calvin asks his tiger companion why people arenever content with what they have. Hobbes replies, "Are you kidding?Your fingernails are a joke, you've got no fangs, you can't see at night,your pink hides are ridiculous, your reflexes are nil, and you don't evenhave tails! Of course people aren't content!" But despite these handicaps,humans control the fate of tigers, rather than vice versa. Humanevolution is the original revenge of the nerds.Perhaps recoiling from the image of the pasty-faced, pocket-protected,polyester-clad misfits, theorists on human evolution have looked far andwide for alternative theories. Human ingenuity has been explained awayas a by-product of blood vessels in the skull that radiate heat, as a runawaycourtship device like the peacock's tail, as a stretching of chimpanzeechildhood, and as an escape hatch that saved the species from theevolutionary dead end of bearing fewer and fewer offspring. Even in theoriesthat acknowledge that intelligence itself was selected for, the causesare badly underpowered in comparison with the effects. In various storiesthe full human mind sprang into existence to solve narrow problems likechipping tools out of stone, cracking open nuts and bones, throwing rocksat animals, keeping track of toddlers, following herds to scavenge theirdead, and maintaining social bonds in a large group.There are grains of truth in these accounts, but they lack the leverageof good reverse-engineering. Natural selection for success in solving aparticular problem tends to fashion an idiot savant like the dead-reckoningants and stargazing birds. We need to know what the more generalkinds of intelligence found in our species are good for. That requires agood description of the improbable feats the human mind accomplishes,not just one-word compliments like "flexibility" or "intelligence." Thatdescription must come from the study of the modern mind, cognitive science,And because selection is driven by the fate of the whole individual,