HOW THE MIND WORKS
By Steven Pinker
Norton, 660 pages, $29.95
Poor Stephen Jay Gould.
The man who probably has done more than any other individual to make biological evolution an accessible and engaging topic now finds himself a victim of his own success. Every few months, it seems, a book comes out that purports to trace the adaptive history of human thought and behavior–subjects that Gould has always claimed are better left to cultural analysis than evolutionary theory. Yet audiences primed by Gould to be enthralled by stories of how the jaw or the inner ear evolved are equally drawn to the tale of how jealousy, love, revenge and reason all sprang up in the minds of our apelike forebears.
Still, none of the proponents of evolutionary psychology, as the field has come to be known, has successfully aped Gould’s combination of writing flair and the academic respectability that a Harvard professorship affords. Leda Cosmides, a Harvard-trained biologist and psychologist who helped jump-start debate about the mind’s origins with a 1989 paper on the evolution of social contracts, leapt into such questions before establishing her reputation with more conventional research. Science journalist Robert Wright’s popularization of Cosmides’ ideas in 1994’s “The Moral Animal” kicked off a vicious, personal squabble between Wright and Gould in the form of dueling magazine essays. Although Wright charges that Gould’s reputation among working biologists is negligible, Wright’s own credentials won’t win him influential allies either.
In Steven Pinker, however, Gould and the other naysayers of evolutionary psychology have found a formidable adversary. Pinker–a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–had established credentials with the academic elite before he took up the cause of evolutionary psychology. And, as his 1994 book, “The Language Instinct,” proved, he is every bit as skillful as Gould at focusing complicated scientific conundrums with a deft turn of phrase or a witty allusion.
Having made a compelling case in his previous book for the idea that language’s structure is ingrained in humans, Pinker, in his newest effort, “How the Mind Works,” applies the evolutionary perspective to an array of mental capacities, including consciousness, 3-D vision, logical thought, moral duty and aesthetic taste. Although the book falls short on some of the deepest questions it proposes to address, it succeeds in advancing a comprehensible and widely applicable theoretical framework–something psychology has largely lacked since the demise of Freudianism and behaviorism earlier this century. The result may establish Pinker not just as the chief champion of evolutionary psychology, but as the foremost public spokesman for psychology as a whole.
Pinker’s writing style belongs in a class of its own, although comparisons to scientific popularizers such as Gould are inevitable. Whereas Gould’s allusions are resolutely highbrow, Pinker grabs the reader by any means necessary, sprinkling informed references to Lou Reed and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” in with the hard-core psychologizing. In a book that takes feminists and leftists to task more than once, Karl Marx merits just one index entry; Groucho Marx gets two.
The lively style is welcome, because “How the Mind Works” makes for slower reading than “The Language Instinct.”
Pinker’s first challenge is to unify the evolutionary perspective with computational theories of mind, a task that is even harder than it sounds. Computer models, according to Pinker, have illustrated that many of the problems that human minds solve every day, such as walking, seeing and social interaction, are insoluble–or at least their solution requires a system that is biased toward certain solutions and not others. Evolution, he claims, has programmed the necessary biases into the human mind. The discussion of what computer models have to include in order to approximate human thought touches on rarefied academic debates that the average reader may not appreciate, but it sets the stage for what comes after.
The book’s best chapter explains 3-D vision, one of Pinker’s areas of expertise. Vision is the classic example of an ill-posed computational problem; the patterns of light and color that strike the retina could be interpreted in countless ways, yet the mind manages to fashion a smooth, consistent image from blooming confusion. To show how this works, Pinker explains a puzzle that has defied more than one reader of novelty books and Sunday comics: the perceptual mechanics behind those maddening “Magic Eye” 3-D stereograms.
The stereograms create their illusion by manipulating the human mind’s sophisticated method of matching images from one eye with those that appear in the other eye. The same mental adaptation that makes stereograms pop out in 3-D allowed our tree-swinging ancestors to see branches hidden in leaf cover, or animal prey camouflaged against a uniform background. Pinker even includes a few examples of 3-D illusions (including one shameless stab at self-promotion), though I recommend a break between sessions of staring at those dancing images and reading the actual text.
Adaptationist explanations of vision are fairly well-established, as even Gould would admit. Pinker’s forays into more characteristically human behavior make up the book’s most adventurous parts–and the most risky. Like other evolutionary psychologists, Pinker believes the mind’s functions are put together like a Swiss army knife, with independent brain modules–or “blades”–that natural selection fashioned to increase our ancestors’ chances of passing on their genes. Gould calls this mode of explanation Darwinian fundamentalism. He and evolutionary psychology’s other opponents liken the mind more to a big blunt rock that can be enlisted for use as a hammer, a foot rest, or a dinner plate. Capacities such as language and abstract thought, by Gould’s logic, could just be inevitable byproducts of the big, all-purpose human brain. The challenge for evolutionary psychology is to show that specialized, hard-wired modules can explain the mind’s higher functions more effectively than the all-purpose blunt-rock model.
Pinker’s most successful account of a higher faculty that developed through evolutionary adaptation comes in the chapter on intuition. He summarizes the last 10 years of breakthroughs in psychology’s understanding of how infants develop their intuitions about the constancy of physical objects with this pithy observation: “Babies are not as stoned as James, Piaget, Freud and others thought.” Human infants are born hard-wired to reason about the world we live in, Pinker concludes. That is especially significant because Gould and others have said that the lack of innate reasoning ability shows how loosely the mind was designed by evolution. If reason is hard-wired, as Pinker argues convincingly, the Swiss army knife model looks more plausible.
Unfortunately, in the book’s last few chapters Pinker describes the evolved mind in the same grim, Machiavellian tones that made Robert Wright’s book such a one-note bore. It is not a new idea that the struggle for survival left humans with inordinately strong family attachments and a talent for manipulative deception. Pinker’s pop-culture hipness starts to grate after the third time he illustrates this point with a scene from the movie “The Godfather.”
The lack of originality is especially disappointing because the last chapters deal with some of Pinker’s deepest questions about human nature. His explanation of the drive to create music and art is downright lame and bewildering. “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake,” he writes, “an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive parts of at least six of our mental faculties.” Such passages make one wonder if evolutionary psychology doesn’t create more problems than it solves.
But Pinker’s mere willingness to take a crack at such fundamental issues sets him apart from most other psychologists now working. His achievement, as he himself admits, lies not in the originality of his ideas but in his synthesis of many different theories. Surprisingly, “How the Mind Works” delivers less real meat than “The Language Instinct.” But for all its shortcomings, Pinker’s canvas offers a broad and inspiring overview of where psychology as a field is heading. Others can fill in the blank spots.
