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

206 HOW THE MIND WORKSThe first claim is that the world contains a wonderful process called"adaptation" that causes organisms to solve problems. Now, in Darwin'sstrict sense, adaptation in the present is caused by selection in the past.Remember how natural selection gives an illusion of teleology: selectionmay look like it is adapting each organism to its needs in the present, butreally it is just favoring the descendants of organisms that were adaptedto their own needs in the past. The genes that built the most adaptivebodies and minds among our ancestors got passed down to build theinnate bodies and minds of today (including innate abilities to track certainkinds of environmental variation, as in tanning, callusing, and learn­ing)-But for some, that does not go far enough; adaptation happens daily."Darwinian social scientists" such as Paul Turke and Laura Betzig believethat "modern Darwinian theory predicts that human behavior'will beadaptive, that is, designed to promote maximum reproductive success. . . through available descendent and nondescendent relatives." "Functionalists"such as the psychologists Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinneysay that they "view the selectional processes operating duringevolution and the selectional processes operating during [learning] aspart of one seamless natural fabric." The implication is that theire is noneed for specialized mental machinery: if adaptation simply makes organismsdo the right thing, who could ask for anything more? The optimalsolution to a problem—eating with one's hands, finding the right mate,inventing tools, using grammatical language—is simply inevitable.The problem with functionalism is that it is Lamarckian. Not in thesense of Lamarck's second principle, the inheritance of acquired characteristics—thegiraffes who stretched their necks and begat baby giraffeswith necks pre-stretched. Everyone knows to stay away from that. (Well,almost everyone: Freud and Piaget stuck to it long after it was abandonedby biologists.) It is Lamarckian in the sense of his first principle,"felt need"—the giraffes growing their necks when they hungrily eyedthe leaves just out of reach. As Lamarck put it, "New needs which establisha necessity for some part really bring about the existence of that partas a result of efforts." If only it were so! As the saying goes, if wishes werehorses, beggars would ride. There are no guardian angels seeing to it thatevery need is met. They are met only when mutations appear that arecapable of building an organ that meets the need, when the organismfinds itself in an environment in which meeting the need translates intomore surviving babies, and in which that selection pressure persists over