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

36 | HOW THE MIND WORKSmore like a kind of genetic data compression or a set of internally generatedtest patterns. These patterns can trigger the cortex at thereceiving end to differentiate, at least one step of the way; into thekind of cortex that is appropriate to processing the incoming information.(For example, in animals that have been cross-wired so that theeyes are connected to the auditory brain, that area shows a few hintsof the properties of the visual brain.) How the genes control braindevelopment is still unknown, but a reasonable summary of what weknow so far is that brain modules assume their identity by a combinationof what kind of tissue they start out as, where they are in thebrain, and what patterns of triggering input they get during criticalperiods in development. >Our organs of computation are a product of natural selection. The biologistRichard Dawkins called natural selection the Blind Watchmaker; inthe case of the mind, we can call it the Blind Programmer. Our mentalprograms work as well as they do because they were shaped by selectionto allow our ancestors to master rocks, tools, plants, animals, and eachother, ultimately in the service of survival and reproduction.Natural selection is not the only cause of evolutionary change. Organismsalso change over the eons because of statistical accidents in wholives and who dies, environmental catastrophes that wipe out whole familiesof creatures, and the unavoidable by-products of changes that arethe product of selection. But natural selection is the only evolutionaryforce that acts like an engineer, "designing" organs that accomplishimprobable but adaptive outcomes (a point that has been made forcefullyby the biologist George Williams and by Dawkins). The textbookargument for natural selection, accepted even by those who: feel thatselection has been overrated (such as the paleontologist Stephen JayGould), comes from the vertebrate eye. Just as a watch has too manyfinely meshing parts (gears, springs, pivots, and so on) to have beenassembled by a tornado or a river eddy, entailing instead the design of awatchmaker, the eye has too many finely meshing parts (lens, iris, retina,and so on) to have arisen from a random evolutionary force like a bigmutation, statistical drift, or the fortuitous shape of the nooks and cranniesbetween other organs. The design of the eye must be a product of