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

300 J HOW THE MIND WORKSdevelopment of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose."Ettu!Wallace became a creationist when he noted that foragers—"savages,"in nineteenth-century parlance—were biologically equal to modernEuropeans. Their brains were the same size, and they could easilyadapt to the intellectual demands of modern life. But in the foragers' wayof life, which was also the life of our evolutionary ancestors, that level ofintelligence was not needed, and there was no occasion to show it off.How, then, could it have evolved in response to the needs of a foraginglifestyle? Wallace wrote:Our law, our government, and our science continually require us to reasonthrough a variety of complicated phenomena to the expected result.Even our games, such as chess, compel us to exercise all these facultiesin a remarkable degree. Compare this with the savage languages, whichcontain no words for abstract conceptions; the utter want of foresight ofthe savage man beyond his simplest necessities; his inability to combine,or to compare, or to reason on any general subject that does not immediatelyappeal to his senses. . . .... A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla would . . . fullyhave sufficed for the limited mental development of the savage; and wemust therefore admit that the large brain he actually possesses couldnever have been solely developed by any of those laws of evolution,whose essence is, that they lead to a degree of organization exactly proportionateto the wants of each species, never beyond those wants. . . .Natural selection could only have endowed savage man with a brain afew degrees superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses onevery little inferior to that of a philosopher.Wallace's paradox, the apparent evolutionary uselessness of humanintelligence, is a central problem of psychology, biology, and the scientificworldview. Even today, scientists such as the astronomer Paul Daviesthink that the "overkill" of human intelligence refutes Darwinism andcalls for some other agent of a "progressive evolutionary trend," perhaps aself-organizing process that will be explained someday by complexity theory.Unfortunately this is barely more satisfying than Wallace's idea of asuperior intelligence guiding the development of man in a definite direction.Much of this book, and this chapter in particular, is aimed at demotingWallace's paradox from a foundation-shaking mystery to a challengingbut otherwise ordinary research problem in the human sciences.