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

40 HOW THE MIND WORKSnovel foods, which are in fact the ones most likely to contain toxins; (5)women's sense of smell becomes hypersensitive during the window ofpregnancy sickness and less sensitive than usual thereafter; (6j) foragingpeoples (including, presumably, our ancestors) are at even higher risk ofingesting plant toxins, because they eat wild plants rather than domesticatedcrops bred for palatability; (7) pregnancy sickness is universalacross human cultures; (8) women with more severe pregnancy sicknessare less likely to miscarry; (9) women with more severe pregnancy sicknessare less likely to bear babies with birth defects. The fit between howa baby-making system in a natural ecosystem ought to work and how thefeelings of modern women do work is impressive, and gives a measure ofconfidence that Profet's hypothesis is correct.I he human mind is a product of evolution, so our mental organs areeither present in the minds of apes (and perhaps other mam'maU andvertebrates) or arose from overhauling the minds of apes, specifirally, thecommon ancestors of humans and chimpanzees that lived ajbout six millionyears ago in Africa. Many titles of books on human evolution remindus of this fact: The Naked Ape, The Electric Ape, Tfae Scented Ape, TheLopsided Ape, The Aquatic Ape, The Thinking Ave, The Human Ape, TheApe That Spoke, The Third Chimpanzee, The Chosen Primate. Someauthors are militant that humans are barely different from chimpanzeesand that any focus on specifically h*fman talents is arrogant chauvinismor tantamount to creationism. Por some readers that is a reductio adabsurdum of the evolutionaryrramework. If the theory says that man "atbest is only a monkey shayed," as Gilbert and Sullivan put it in PrincessIda, then it fails to explain the obvious fact that men and monkeys havedifferent minds. /We are naked, lopsided apes that speak, but we also have minds thatdiffer considerably from those of apes. The outsize brain of Homo sapienssapiens is, by any standard, an extraordinary adaptation. It has allowed usto inhabit every ecosystem on earth, reshape the planet, walk on themoon, and discover the secrets of the physical universe. Chimpanzees,for all ineir vaunted intelligence, are a threatened species clinging to afew/patches of forest and living as they did millions of years ] ago. Our-curiosity about this difference demands more than repeating that we