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

5GOOD IDEASIhope you have not murdered too completely your own and mychild." So wrote Darwin to Alfred Russel Wallace, the biologistwho had independently discovered natural selection. Whatprompted the purple prose? Darwin and Wallace were mutual admirers,so like-minded that they had been inspired by the same author(Malthus) to forge the same theory in almost the same words. Whatdivided these comrades was the human mind. Darwin had coyly predictedthat "psychology will be placed on a new foundation," and in hisnotebooks was positively grandiose about how evolutionary theory wouldrevolutionize the study of mind:Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He whounderstand baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.Plato says . . . that our "imaginary ideas" arise from the preexistence ofthe soul, are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.He went on to write two books on the evolution of human thoughts andfeelings, The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Manand Animals.But Wallace reached the opposite conclusion. The mind, he said, isoverdesigned for the needs of evolving humans and cannot be explainedby natural selection. Instead, "a superior intelligence has guided the299