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

42 HOW THE MIND WORKSFirst, selection operates over thousands of generations. For ninetyninepercent of human existence, people lived as foragers j in smallnomadic bands. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life,not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are notwired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government,police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions,high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience.Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computerage, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything wedo. Our ancestral environment lacked the institutions that now enticeus to nonadaptive choices, such as religious orders, adoption agencies,and pharmaceutical companies, so until very recently there was nevera selection pressure to resist the enticements. Had the Pleistocenesavanna contained trees bearing birth-control pills, we might haveevolved to find them as terrifying as a venomous spider.Second, natural selection is not a puppetmaster that pulls the stringsof behavior directly. It acts by designing the generator of behavior: thepackage of information-processing and goal-pursuing mechanisms calledthe mind. Our minds are designed to generate behavior that would havebeen adaptive, on average, in our ancestral environment, but any particulardeed done today is the effect of dozens of causes. Behavior is the outcomeof an internal struggle among many mental modules, and it isplayed out on the chessboard of opportunities and constraints defined byother people's behavior. A recent cover story in Time asked, "Adultery: IsIt in Our Genes?" The question makes no sense because neither adulterynor any other behavior can be in our genes. Conceivably a desire for adulterycan be an indirect product of our genes, but the desire may be overriddenby other desires that are also indirect products of our genes, suchas the desire to have a trusting spouse. And the desire, even if it prevailsin the rough-and-tumble of the mind, cannot be consummated as overtbehavior unless there is a partner around in whom that desire has alsoprevailed. Behavior itself did not evolve; what evolved was the mind.Reverse-engineering is possible only when one has a hint of what thedevice was designed to accomplish. We do not understand theolive-pitteruntil we catch on that it was designed as a machine for pitting olives