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

Standard Equipment 41share most of our DNA with chimpanzees and that small changes canhave big effects. Three hundred thousand generations and up to tenmegabytes of potential genetic information are enough to revamp a mindconsiderably. Indeed, minds are probably easier to revamp than bodiesbecause software is easier to modify than hardware. We should not besurprised to discover impressive new cognitive abilities in humans, languagebeing just the most obvious one.None of this is incompatible with the theory of evolution. Evolution isa conservative process, to be sure, but it can't be all that conservative orwe would all be pond scum. Natural selection introduces differencesinto descendants by fitting them with specializations that adapt them todifferent niches. Any museum of natural history has examples of complexorgans unique to a species or to a group of related species: the elephant'strunk, the narwhal's tusk, the whale's baleen, the platypus'duckbill, the armadillo's armor. Often they evolve rapidly on the geologicaltimescale. The first whale evolved in something like ten million yearsfrom its common ancestor with its closest living relatives, ungulates suchas cows and pigs. A book about whales could, in the spirit of the human-I evolution books, be called The Naked Cow, but it would be disappointing/ if the book spent every page marveling at the similarities between whales/ and cows and never got around to discussing the adaptations that makeI them so different.To say that the mind is an evolutionary adaptation is not to say that allbehavior is adaptive in Darwin's sense. Natural selection is not aguardian angel that hovers over us making sure that our behavior alwaysmaximizes biological fitness. Until recently, scientists with an evolutionarybent felt a responsibility to account for acts that seem like Darwiniansuicide, such as celibacy, adoption, and contraception. Perhaps, theyventured, celibate people have more time to raise large broods of niecesand nephews and thereby propagate more copies of their genes than theywould if they had their own children. This kind of stretch is unnecessary,however. The reasons, first articulated by the anthropologist DonaldSymons, distinguish evolutionary psychology from the school of thoughtin the 1970s and 1980s called sociobiology (though there is much overlapbetween the approaches as well).