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

Good Ideas | 301Stephen Jay Gould, in an illuminating essay on Darwin and Wallace,sees Wallace as an extreme adaptationist who ignores the possibility ofexaptations: adaptive structures that are "fortuitously suited to other roles ifelaborated" (such as jaw bones becoming middle-ear bones) and "featuresthat arise without functions . . . but remain available for later co-optation"(such as the panda's thumb, which is really a jury-rigged wristbone).Objects designed for definite purposes can, as a result of their structuralcomplexity, perform many other tasks as well. A factory may install acomputer only to issue the monthly pay checks, but such a machine canalso analyze the election returns or whip anyone's ass (or at least perpetuallytie them) in tic-tac-toe.I agree with Gould that the brain has been exapted for novelties like calculusor chess, but this is just an avowal of faith by people like us whobelieve in natural selection; it can hardly fail to be true. It raises the questionof who or what is doing the elaborating and co-opting, and why theoriginal structures were suited to being co-opted. The factory analogy isnot helpful. A computer that issues paychecks cannot also analyze electionreturns or play tic-tac-toe, unless someone has reprogrammed it first.Wallace went off the tracks not because he was too much of an adaptationistbut because he was a lousy linguist, psychologist, and anthropologist(to judge him, unfairly, by modern standards). He saw a chasmbetween the simple, concrete, here-and-now thinking of foraging peoplesand the abstract rationality exercised in modern pursuits like science,mathematics, and chess. But there is no chasm. Wallace, to give him hisdue, was ahead of his time in realizing that foragers were not on the lowerrungs of some biological ladder. But he was wrong about their language,thought, and lifestyle. Prospering as a forager is a more difficult problemthan doing calculus or playing chess. As we saw in Chapter 3, people in allsocieties have words for abstract conceptions, have foresight beyond simplenecessities, and combine, compare, and reason on general subjectsthat do not immediately appeal to their senses. And people everywhere putthese abilities to good use in outwitting the defenses of the local flora andfauna. We will soon see that all people, right from the cradle, engage in ahind of scientific thinking. We are all intuitive physicists, biologists, engineers,psychologists, and mathematicians. Thanks to these inborn talents,we outperform robots and have wreaked havoc on the planet.On the other hand, our intuitive science is different from what thepeople in white coats do. Though most of us would not agree with Lucy