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

Family Values 517many flights. But the only way to increase the payload was to reduce thefuel, which meant that the planes would have to fly on one-way missions.If the fliers would be willing to draw lots and take a one-in-twochance of flying off to a certain death instead of hanging on to theirthree-in-four chance of flying off to an unpredictable death, they woulddouble their chance of survival: only half of them would die instead ofthree-quarters. Needless to say, it was never implemented. Few of uswould accept such an offer, though it is completely fair and would savemany lives, including, possibly, our own. The paradox is an intriguingdemonstration that our mind is equipped to volunteer for a risk of deathin a coalition but only if we do not know when death will come.HUMANITYSo should we all just take poison now and be done with it? Some peoplethink that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that humannature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers andanyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needsa scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The questionhas been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographicrecord, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like anopen question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a baddream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love oneanother. The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on humannature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind ofinsight that only science can provide: to connect what we know abouthuman nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works,and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number ofassumptions. Already a large part of our social psychology, well documentedin the lab and the field, can be shown to fall out of a fewassumptions about kin selection, parental investment, reciprocal altruism,and the computational theory of mind.So does human nature doom us to a nightmare of exploitation byruthless fitness-maximizersr 1 Again, it is silly to look to science for theanswer. Everyone knows that people are capable of monumental kindnessand sacrifice. The mind has many components, and accommodatesnot only ugly motives but love, friendship, cooperation, a sense of fair-