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

Standard Equipment 27reasons. To explain how birds fly, we invoke principles of lift and dragand fluid mechanics that also explain how airplanes fly. That does notcommit us to an Airplane Metaphor for birds, complete with jet enginesand complimentary beverage service.Without the computational theory, it is impossible to make sense ofthe evolution of the mind. Most intellectuals think that the human mindmust somehow have escaped the evolutionary process. Evolution, theythink, can fabricate only stupid instincts and fixed action patterns: a sexdrive, an aggression urge, a territorial imperative, hens sitting on eggsand ducklings following hulks. Human behavior is too subtle and flexibleto be a product of evolution, they think; it must come from somewhereelse—from, say, "culture." But if evolution equipped us not with irresistibleurges and rigid reflexes but with a neural computer, everythingchanges. A program is an intricate recipe of logical and statistical operationsdirected by comparisons, tests, branches, loops, and subroutinesembedded in subroutines. Artificial computer programs, from the Macintoshuser interface to simulations of the weather to programs that recognizespeech and answer questions in English, give us a hint of thefinesse and power of which computation is capable. Human thought andbehavior, no matter how subtle and flexible, could be the product of avery complicated program, and that program may have been our endowmentfrom natural selection. The typical imperative from biology is not"Thou shalt. . . ," but "If . . . then . . . else."The mind, I claim, is not a single organ but a system of organs, whichwe can think of as psychological faculties or mental modules. Theentities now commonly evoked to explain the mind—such as generalintelligence, a capacity to form culture, and multipurpose learningstrategies—will surely go the way of protoplasm in biology and of earth,air, fire, and water in physics. These entities are so formless, comparedto the exacting phenomena they are meant to explain, that they mustbe granted near-magical powers. When the phenomena are put underthe microscope, we discover that the complex texture of the everydayworld is supported not by a single substance but by many layers ofelaborate machinery. Biologists long ago replaced the concept of an allpowerfulprotoplasm with the concept of functionally specialized