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

306 | HOW THE MIND WORKSstumble upon evidence undermining their claims to have descended fromheroes and gods. Brown looked at twenty-five civilizations and comparedthe ones organized by hereditary castes with the others. None of the castesocieties had developed a tradition of writing accurate depictions of thepast; instead of history they had myth and legend. The caste societieswere also distinguished by an absence of political science, social science,natural science, biography, realistic portraiture, and uniform education.Good science is pedantic, expensive, and subversive. It was anunlikely selection pressure within illiterate foraging bands like our ancestors',and we should expect people's native "scientific" abilities to differfrom the genuine article.LITTLE BOXESThe humorist Robert Benchley said that there are two classes of peoplein the world: those who divide the people of the world into two classes,and those who do not. In Chapter 2, when I asked why the mind keepstrack of individuals, I took it for granted that the mind forms categories.But the habit of categorizing deserves scrutiny as well. People put thingsand other people into mental boxes, give each box a name, and thereaftertreat the contents of a box the same. But if our fellow humans are asunique as their fingerprints and no two snowflakes are alike, why theurge to classify?Psychology textbooks typically give two explanations, neither of whichmakes sense. One is that memory cannot hold all the events that bombardour senses; by storing only their categories, we cut down on theload. But the brain, with its trillion synapses, hardly seems short of storagespace. It's reasonable to say that entities cannot fit in memory whenthe entities are combinatorial—English sentences, chess games, allshapes in all colors and sizes at all locations—because the numbers fromcombinatorial explosions can exceed the number of particles in the universeand overwhelm even the most generous reckoning of the brain'scapacity. But people live for a paltry two billion seconds, and there is noknown reason why the brain could not record every object and event weexperience if it had to. Also, we often remember both a category and itsmembers, such as months, family members, continents, and baseballteams, so the category adds to the memory load.