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

302 | HOW THE MIND WORKSin Peanuts that fir trees give us fur, sparrows grow into eagles that we eaton Thanksgiving, and you can tell a tree's age by counting its leaves, ourbeliefs are sometimes just as daffy. Children insist that a piece of styrofoamweighs nothing and that people know the outcome of events theydid not witness or hear about. They grow into adults who think that aball flying out of a spiral tube will continue in a spiral path and that astring of heads makes a coin more likely to land tails.This chapter is about human reasoning: how people make sense oftheir world. To reverse-engineer our faculties of reasoning, we mustbegin with Wallace's paradox. To dissolve it, we have to distinguish theintuitive science and mathematics that is part of the human birthrightfrom the modern, institutionalized version that most people find so hard.Then we can explore how our intuitions work, where they came from,and how they are elaborated and polished to give the virtuoso performancesof modern civilization.ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCEEver since the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget likened children to littlescientists, psychologists have compared the person in the street, youngand old, to the person in the lab. The analogy is reasonable up to a point.Both scientists and children have to make sense of the world, and childrenare curious investigators striving to turn their observations into validgeneralizations. Once I had family and friends staying over, and a threeyear-oldboy accompanied my sister as she bathed my infant niece. Afterstaring quietly for several minutes he announced, "Babies don't havepenises." The boy deserves our admiration, if not for the accuracy of hisconclusion, then for the keenness of his scientific spirit.Natural selection, however, did not shape us to earn good grades inscience class or to publish in refereed journals. It shaped us to masterthe local environment, and that led to discrepancies between how wenaturally think and what is demanded in the academy.For many years the psychologist Michael Cole and his colleaguesstudied a Liberian people called the Kpelle. They are an articulategroup, enjoying argument and debate. Most are illiterate andunschooled, and they do poorly on tests that seem easy to us. This dialogueshows why: