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

Standard Equipment 43 ,,rather than as a paperweight or wrist-exerciser. The goals of the designermust be sought for every part of a complex device and for the device as awhole. Automobiles have a component, the carburetor, tharts designedto mix air and gasoline, and mixing air and gasoline is af swbgoal of theultimate goal, carting people around. Though the mo/Cess of naturalselection itself has no goal, it evolved entities that tlik/e the automobile)are highly organized to bring about certain goals' and subgoals. Toreverse-engineer the mind, we must sort them out/and identify the ultimategoal in its design. Was the human mind yAtitmately designed to createbeauty? To discover truth? To love and trfySvork? To harmonize withother human beings and with nature? /The logic of natural selection gives thef answer. The ultimate goal thatthe mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies ofthe genes that created it. Natural selection cares only about the longtermfate of entities that replicate"; that is, entities that retain a stableidentity across many generation? of copying. It predicts only that replicatorswhose effects tend to ennance the probability of their own replicationcome to predominate/When we ask questions like "Who or what issupposed to benefit frqjn an adaptation?" and "What is a design in livingthings a design /or?"/tne theory of natural selection provides the answer:the long-term stable replicators, genes. Even our bodies, our selves, arenot the ultimate beneficiary of our design. As Gould has said, "What isthe 'individual reproductive success' of which Darwin speaks? It cannotbe the passage of one's body into the next generation—for, truly, youcan't take it with you in this sense above all!" The criterion by whichgenesr get selected is the quality of the bodies they build, but it is thegejnes making it into the next generation, not the perishable bodies, thatAre selected to live and fight another day.Though there are some holdouts (such as Gould himself), the gene'seyeview predominates in evolutionary biology and has been a stunningsuccess. It has asked, and is finding answers to, the deepest questionsabout life, such as how life arose, why there are cells, why there are bodies,why there is sex, how the genome is structured, why animals interactsocially, and why there is communication. It is as indispensable toresearchers in animal behavior as Newton's laws are to mechanical engineers.But almost everyone misunderstands the theory. Contrary to popularbelief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that thepoint of all human striving is to spread our genes. With the exception of