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

208 | HOW THE MIND WORKSthere was a sugar bowl, salt shaker, and butter dish on every table, andwhen lean years were never far away, one could never get too muchsweet, salty, and fatty food. People do not divine what is adaptive forthem or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings thatwere adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.I he other extension of adaptation is the seemingly innocuous clichethat "cultural evolution has taken over from biological evolution." Formillions of years, genes were transmitted from body to body and wereselected to confer adaptations on organisms. But after humans emerged,units of culture were transmitted from mind to mind and were selectedto confer adaptations on cultures. The torch of progress has been passedto a swifter runner. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, a hairy arm hurls a boneinto the air, and it fades into a space station.The premise of cultural evolution is that there is a single phenomenon—themarch of progress, the ascent of man, apes to Armageddon—that Darwin explained only up to a point. My own view is that humanbrains evolved by one set of laws, those of natural selection and genetics,and now interact with one another according to other sets of laws, thoseof cognitive and social psychology, human ecology, and history. Thereshaping of the skull and the rise and fall of empires may have little incommon.Richard Dawkins has drawn the clearest analogy between the selectionof genes and the selection of bits of culture, which he clubbedmemes. Memes such as tunes, ideas, and stories spread from brain tobrain and sometimes mutate in the transmission. New features of ameme that make its recipients more likely to retain and disseminate it,such as being catchy, seductive, funny, or irrefutable, will lead to thememe's becoming more common in the meme pool. In subsequentrounds of retelling, the most spreadworthy memes will spread the mostand will eventually take over the population. Ideas will therefore evolveto become better adapted to spreading themselves. Note that we aretalking about ideas evolving to become more spreadable, not peopleevolving to become more knowledgeable.Dawkins himself used the analogy to illustrate how natural selectionpertains to anything that can replicate, not just DNA. Others treat it as a