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

Good Ideas 325new releases or classic musicals. There is no single correct tree of videotapes.The anthropologists Brent Berlin and Scott Atran have discoveredthat folk taxonomies all over the world work the same way as the Linnaeantree. People group all the local plants and animals into kinds thatcorrespond to the biologist's "genus." Since there is usually only onespecies per genus in a locality, their categories usually match the biologist's"species" as well. Every folk genus belongs to a single "life form,"such as mammals, birds, mushrooms, herbs, insects, or reptiles. The lifeforms are in turn either animals or plants. People override appearanceswhen classifying living things; for example, they lump frogs and tadpoles.They use their classes to reason about how animals work, such as whocan breed with whom.One of Darwin's best arguments for evolution was that it explainedwhy living things are hierarchically grouped. The tree of life is a familytree. The members of a species seem to share an essence because theyare descendants of a common ancestor that passed it on. Species fall intogroups within groups because they diverged from even earlier commonancestors. Embryonic and internal features are more sensible criteriathan surface appearance because they better reflect degree of relatedness.Darwin had to fight his contemporaries' intuitive essentialism because,taken to an extreme, it implied that species could not change. A reptilehas a reptilian essence and can no more evolve into a bird than thenumber seven can evolve into an even number. As recently as the1940s, the philosopher Mortimer Adler argued that just as there can beno three-and-a-half-sided triangle, there can be nothing intermediatebetween an animal and a human, so humans could not have evolved.Darwin pointed out that species are populations, not ideal types, withmembers that vary; in the past they could have shaded into in-betweenforms.Today we have gone to the other extreme, and in modern academiclife "essentialist" is just about the worst thing you can call someone. Inthe sciences, essentialism is tantamount to creationism. In the humanities,the label implies that the person subscribes to insane beliefs such asthat the sexes are not socially constructed, there are universal humanemotions, a real world exists, and so on. And in the social sciences,"essentialism" has joined "reductionism," "determinism," and "reification"as a term of abuse hurled at anyone who tries to explain human