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

210 I HOW THE MIND WORKScultural change, particularly their demographics—how memes canbecome popular or unpopular. But the analogy is more from epidemiologythan from evolution: ideas as contagious diseases that caluse epidemics,rather than as advantageous genes that cause adaptations. Theyexplain how ideas become popular, but not where ideas come from.Many people unfamiliar with cognitive science see cultural Evolutionas the only hope for grounding wispy notions like ideas and culture inrigorous evolutionary biology. To bring culture into biology, they reason,one shows how it evolved by its own version of natural selection. But thatis a non sequitur; the products of evolution don't have to look like evolution.The stomach is firmly grounded in biology, but it does not randomlysecrete variants of acids and enzymes, retain the ones that break downfood a bit, let them sexually recombine and reproduce, and so on forhundreds of thousands of meals. Natural selection already went throughsuch trial and error in designing the stomach, and now the stomach is anefficient chemical processor, releasing the right acids and enzymes oncue. Likewise, a group of minds does not have to recapitulate the processof natural selection to come up with a good idea. Natural selectiondesigned the mind to be an information processor, and now it perceives,imagines, simulates, and plans. When ideas are passed around, theyaren't merely copied with occasional typographical errors; they are evaluated,discussed, improved on, or rejected. Indeed, a mind that passivelyaccepted ambient memes would be a sitting duck for exploitation by othersand would have quickly been selected against.The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote that nothingin biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. We can add thatnothing in culture makes sense except in the light of psychology. Evolutioncreated psychology, and that is how it explains culture. The mostimportant relic of early humans is the modern mind.