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

Revenge of the Nerds 207thousands of generations. Otherwise, the need goes unmet. Swimmersdo not grow webbed fingers; Eskimos do not grow fur. I have studiedthree-dimensional mirror-images for twenty years, and though I knowmathematically that you can convert a left shoe into a right shoe by turningit around in the fourth dimension, I have been unable to grow a 4-Dmental space in which to visualize the flip.Felt need is an alluring idea. Needs really do feel like they bring forththeir own solutions. You're hungry, you have hands, the food's in front ofyou, you eat with your hands; how else could it be? Ah, but you're thelast one we should ask. Your brain was fashioned by natural selection sothat it would find such problems obvious. Change the mind (to a robot's,or to another animal's, or to a neurological patient's), or change the problem,and it's no longer so obvious what's obvious. Rats can't learn to dropa piece of food for a larger reward. When chimpanzees try to imitatesomeone raking in an inaccessible snack, they don't notice that the rakehas to be held business-end down, even if the role model makes a conspicuousshow of aligning it properly. Lest you feel smug, the chapters tocome will show how the design of our own minds gives rise to paradoxes,brain-teasers, myopias, illusions, irrationalities, and self-defeating strategiesthat prevent, rather than guarantee, the meeting of our everydayneeds.But what about the Darwinian imperative to survive and reproduce?As far as day-to-day behavior is concerned, there is no such imperative.People watch pornography when they could be seeking a mate, forgofood to buy heroin, sell their blood to buy movie tickets (in India), postponechildbearing to climb the corporate ladder, and eat themselves intoan early grave. Human vice is proof that biological adaptation is, speakingliterally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foragingbands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of itsexistence, not to the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since theagricultural and industrial revolutions. Before there was photography, itwas adaptive to receive visual images of attractive members of the oppositesex, because those images arose only from light reflecting off fertilebodies. Before opiates came in syringes, they were synthesized in thebrain as natural analgesics. Before there were movies, it was adaptive towitness people's emotional struggles, because the only struggles youcould witness were among people you had to psych out every day. Beforethere was contraception, children were unpostponable, and status andwealth could be converted into more children and healthier ones. Before