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

38 HOW THE MIND WORKSdare to seek an evolutionary explanation of how some part of the mindworks. It is because they botch the job. First, many of them never botherto establish the facts. Has anyone ever documented that women like toask for directions? Would a woman in a foraging society not have cometo harm when she approached a stranger? Second, even if the facts hadbeen established, the stories try to explain one puzzling fact by taking forgranted some other fact that is just as much of a puzzle, getting usnowhere. Why do rhythmic noises bring a community together? Why dopeople like to be with happy people? Why does humor relieve tension?The authors of these explanations treat some parts of our mental life asso obvious—they are, after all, obvious to each of us, here inside ourheads—that they don't need to be explained. But all parts of the mindare up for grabs—every reaction, every pleasure, every taste— L when wetry to explain how it evolved. We could have evolved like the Samaritan Irobot, which sacrificed itself to save a sack of lima beans, or like dungbeetles, which must find dung delicious, or like the masochist in the oldjoke about sadomasochism (Masochist: "Hit me!" Sadist: "No!").A good adaptationist explanation needs the fulcrum of an engineeringanalysis that is independent of the part of the mind we are trying toexplain. The analysis begins with a goal to be attained and a world ofcauses and effects in which to attain it, and goes on to specify whatkinds of designs are better suited to attain it than others. Unfortunatelyfor those who think that the departments in a university reflect meaningfuldivisions of knowledge, it means that psychologists have to look outsidepsychology if they want to explain what the parts of the mind are for.To understand sight, we have to look to optics and computer visionsystems. To understand movement, we have to look to robotics. Tounderstand sexual and familial feelings, we have to look to Mendeliangenetics. To understand cooperation and conflict, we have to look to themathematics of games and to economic modeling.Once we have a spec sheet for a well-designed mind, we can seewhether Homo sapiens has that kind of mind. We do the experiments orsurveys to get the facts down about a mental faculty, and then seewhether the faculty meets the specs: whether it shows signs of precision,complexity, efficiency, reliability, and specialization in solving its assignedproblem, especially in comparison with the vast number of alternativedesigns that are biologically growable.The logic of reverse-engineering has guided researchers in visual perceptionfor over a century, and that may be why we understand vision