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

34 J HOW THE MIND WORKSingless, but I think it confuses two issues: what all minds have in common,and how minds can differ. The vapid statements above can bemade intelligible by replacing "How X works" with "What makes X workbetter than Y":The usefulness of a computer depends on both the power of itsprocessor and the expertise of the user.The speed of a car depends on the engine, the fuel, and the skill of thedriver. All are important factors.The quality of sound coming from a CD player depends on two crucialvariables: the player's mechanical and electronic design, and thequality of the original recording. Neither can be ignored.When we are interested in haw much better one system functionsthan a similar one, it is reasonable to gloss over the causal chains insideeach system and tally up the factors that make the whole thing fast orslow, hi-fi or low-fi. And this ranking of people—to determine who entersmedical school, or who gets the job—is where the framing of nature versusnurture comes from.But this book is about how the mind works, not about why some people'sminds might work a bit better in certain ways than other people'sminds. The evidence suggests that humans everywhere on the planet see,talk, and think about objects and people in the same basic way. The differencebetween Einstein and a high school dropout is trivial compared tothe difference between the high school dropout and the best robot in existence,or between the high school dropout and a chimpanzee. That isthe mystery I want to address. Nothing could be farther from my subjecti matter than a comparison between the means of overlapping bell curves\ for some crude consumer index like IQ. And for this reason, the relativeimportance of innateness and learning is a phony issue.An emphasis on innate design should not, by the way, be confusedwith the search for "a gene for" this or that mental organ. Think of thegenes and putative genes that have made the headlines: genes for musculardystrophy, Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's, alcoholism, schizophrenia,manic-depressive disorder, obesity, violent outbursts, dyslexia,bed-wetting, and some kinds of retardation. They are disord&rs, all ofthem. There have been no discoveries of a gene for civility, language,memory, motor control, intelligence, or other complete mental systems,and there probably won't ever be. The reason was summed up by thepolitician Sam Rayburn: Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a