Why do fools fall in love? Why are we soothed by paintings and music? And why do puzzles like the self, free will, and consciousness leave us dizzy? This arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection.
Slight background story: I was having a discussion with a guy on goodreads. To put it bluntly: our genes are selfish, but we are not not necessarily, unconditionally so at least.
You are not a gene, nor am I. Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.
With the exception of the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated patients with his own semen, the donor to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, and other kooks, no human being or animal strives to spread his or her genes. Dawkins explained the theory in a book called The Selfish Gene , and the metaphor was chosen carefully. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the gene buys a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved.
Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends. A reviewer of a book about the evolution of sexuality protests that human adultery, unlike the animal equivalent, cannot be a strategy to spread genes because adulteres take steps to prevent pregancy.
But whose strategy are we talking about? This too is a mix up. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play with in a play, not the interior monologue of the players. The reader sounds like one of those prototypical 's or 60's educational film narrators. It works pretty well.
View all 10 comments. Sep 29, Josh Hamacher rated it liked it. I finally finished this book. It took me far longer than I care to admit to do so. On at least one occasion I lost interest and put it down for several weeks before coming back to it.
I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly why this was the case. It's not that it's bad - in fact, parts of it are absolutely fascinating.
It's certainly not the writing; Pinker is quite good despite a tendency to repeat himself frequently. I think it boiled down to two things for me, with both of them being I finally finished this book. I think it boiled down to two things for me, with both of them being closely related and maybe even the same : 1.
This is a page book with only eight chapters. Each chapter is almost a short book on its own, divided into many sections. While a common theme ties together each chapter the sections are often quite divergent.
It was hard to maintain momentum when moving from one section to another that seemed only tangentially related. The subject is the human mind, providing practically infinite material. I think for anyone there would be parts that are interesting and parts that aren't. Having said that, I still recommend this book. This book was an amazing read!
I cannot get around the fact that it was written by one person, let alone one person with a lot of other books on the same topic, and yet more provocative each time.
I loved the detailed and comprehensive outlook on each subject matter. It is not a textbook, It is a long essay that gives you a rational, up-to-date, coherent, general yet accurate, A frame for thinking about mind, cognition, and emotions, and also changes our day-to-day worldview about people in genera This book was an amazing read!
It is not a textbook, It is a long essay that gives you a rational, up-to-date, coherent, general yet accurate, A frame for thinking about mind, cognition, and emotions, and also changes our day-to-day worldview about people in general. Aug 30, Michael rated it it was amazing Shelves: psychology , non-fiction , philosophy , neuroscience. This is a very readable and influential synthesis of the cognitive science view of the mind with that of evolutionary psychology.
The overall thrust is that the mind is a neural computer closely governed by feelings and desires that were shaped by natural selection for their adaptive value in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our ancestors.
The book is lively, with lots of down to earth examples. He holds your hand when wading through many technical subjects, faces disputes in a non-dogmatic way, This is a very readable and influential synthesis of the cognitive science view of the mind with that of evolutionary psychology.
He holds your hand when wading through many technical subjects, faces disputes in a non-dogmatic way, and addresses political spins on scientific matters in a forthright way. The heft and scope of the volume is daunting.
Yet it is written to be accessible to the general reader as well as scholars. As the emphasis is on synthesis and not a unifying novel theory of mind dependent on the cohesion of all its parts, I feel that the average reader could benefit from reading only the chapters of interest to them.
There are sections on visual perception, neural network modeling, passionate emotions, social behaviors, and cultural innovations. This includes accounts of adaptive values for lying, self delusion, war, mass murder, rape, pornography, parent-child and sibling conflict, altruism, love, marriage, and friendship. He places a big emphasis on the role of beliefs and desires in his perspective on the core properties of human intellect.
Physics provides no insight into the machinations of a crafty lawyer, and even fails to enlighten us about many simpler acts of living things. As this book was written in , it misses the neurological synthesis of the computational and emotional aspects of the mind achieved by Damasio in his book and the decade of great ferment in cognitive neuroscience due to studies using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
For example, understanding a human tendency to revile other cultures does not excuse the Holocaust. Biological determinism for even liberal values can be misguided, e. He also places a lot of advanced cultural accomplishments of humans, such as art, humor, and religion in a category of having no likely evolutionary adaptive value. View all 7 comments. May 04, Brad Acker rated it it was ok.
This book frequently gets rave reviews. Whenever i sit down to read Pinker, i wish i were drinking again. Here is an example of a typical quotation from this book that i could only follow if i were drunk: "The cobalt 60 nucleus is said to spin counterclockwise if you look down on its north pole, but that description by itself is circular because 'north pole' is simply what we call the end of the axis from which a rotation looks counterclockwise.
Dec 23, Lewis Weinstein rated it did not like it. Jan 09, Erwin rated it really liked it. Very interesting. How the Mind Works was published back in , but I didn't encounter any of the points that Pinker made in High School or Collage, up until Pinker focuses on a "computational theory of mind", saying that the mind is a complex paralle Very interesting.
Pinker focuses on a "computational theory of mind", saying that the mind is a complex parallel information processing system. Of course Pinker doesn't have the "final word" on How the Mind Works, but he provides more evidence, more insight, and more rationality than the "romantics" and their leaders Freud Sigmund Sigmund and Carl Jung.
Unfortunately for Americans, Political Correctness seems to be a barrier to accurately seeing human nature, as human nature necessarily is different for different groups of people, particularly for men and women. My favorite anecdote is about the "Coolidge effect": … an old joke about Calvin Coolidge when he was President … The President and Mrs.
Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently.
President, a different hen every time. The mind, he writes, is a system of "organs of computation" that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other.
How the Mind Works explains many of the imponderables of everyday life. Why does a face look more attractive with makeup? How do "Magic-Eye" 3-D stereograms work? Why do we feel that a run of heads makes the coin more likely to land tails? Why is the thought of eating worms disgusting? Why do men challenge each other to duels and murder their ex-wives?
Why are children bratty? Why do fools fall in love? Why are we soothed by paintings and music? And why do puzzles like the self, free will, and consciousness leave us dizzy? This arguments in the book are as bold as its title.
Pinker rehabilitates unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection.
And he challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, that creativity springs from the unconscious, that nature is good and modern society corrupting, and that art and religion are expressions of our higher spiritual yearnings.
Jul 25, Sajid rated it it was ok. Long long book. Overburdened with information,but gives very little to the mind. It is a book about how our minds work. I was wondering while reading, does it really get to the point what it tries to explain? And i found very short amount of words motivated towards its motivation. After keeping me drawn to every opening chapters it deviates from its promise and becomes dull.
There are so many things to skip which is because of Pinker's inability to understand what should be included in this book Long long book. There are so many things to skip which is because of Pinker's inability to understand what should be included in this book. This is his widely quoted defense of choosing not to have children thus subverting evolutionary imperative, "and if my genes don't like it they can jump in a lake.
While conception is a necessary step on the path to a child, Pinker's claim, to be interesting, must be at least partly causal. This is why we find his objection to our accusation of genetic determinism curious. Here again, he drives the narrative forward by making claims that sound strong and controversial only to turn them bland and incontestable through qualification. One final point on this topic: Pinker resents our implication that his evolutionary stories reflect no more than his biography.
Fair enough. We do not know the details of his life or motivations, and were too quick to suggest that his stories only reflect his biography. We offered this hypothesis after having slogged through the book, and found ourselves unconvinced by his insistence that the conclusions are forced on him by data, unmediated by his predilections.
Wherever they come from we still insist that there are richer and more interesting organizing myths. For those outside evolutionary biology, the stakes in the debate about the extent of functional adaptation may seem esoteric, so some background may be useful. Arguing from function to structure the explanation for the heart's structure is its function, pumping blood is an example of teleological thinking.
Reasoning from "final causes" is disreputable when discussing systems that lack intention primarily because it seems to be future states reaching back to form what will be.
No one has a problem with saying a pot looks the way it does because the artisan wanted to make it that way, though even here the medium can push against the intentions of the creator. Darwin salvaged this form of thinking in biology through a clever insight, natural selection. After Darwin, function-centric teleological accounts became a kind of shorthand, able to unroll into a more elaborate hypothesis involving variation, heritability, and selection.
A counter-tradition and useful dialectical tension for functionalism is structuralism, an emphasis on conserved structures.
The selectionist argument that allows us to speak teleologically about a trait requires that the population have variance in the trait. HTMW claims that all of the uniquely human traits emerged through selection on the savanna. But we do not know the variance in human populations with respect to behavioral traits , years ago, nor do we know the heritability of these dispositions. Unambiguous function assignment is difficult in any case, and from the distance of over a hundred millennia the data you would use to make tentative assignments is quite meager.
Structuralism faces a symmetrical challenge: identifying structures that are "the same" homologies. These two perspectives provide an essential tension. In the late s functionalism associated itself with evolution and structuralism was associated by functionalists with special creation. This has left an unfortunate residue, for as special creation was dismissed structuralism sank with it.
Rather than a creative tension between these positions we have the odd situation where some evolutionists assign notions of historical, developmental, or structural constraints to footnotes and caveats. Fortunately, with the string of successes in developmental genetics in the last decade this is changing. In part, the differences are matters of temperament: some are content to study the mind and its properties, others insist that we must first agree that the properties are adaptations even if they can't deliver on the full account that adaptations demand.
To us, studying the properties is the interesting thing, not asserting that they are adaptations and then studying them. Moreover, we think that the realization that brains and neurons are homologous structures has been methodologically much more productive allowing us to do neurobiology by studying mice, crayfish, flies, octopus, and sea hares.
Finally, what are we to make of the suggestion that we along with Stephen J. Well, it is high praise indeed. If we reflect Lewontin's admirable writings, and this puts us on the dais or in the dungeon with other compelling writers, we welcome the association. When Steve Pinker asserts that we are all suspicious of attempts to connect psychology with standard evolutionary biology, he is right! We do not believe that nearly enough is known at present about psychology or evolution to link them.
But it is possible to link a caricature of each, and this is what we found in HTMW. Richard Feynman put it well. Our responsibility is to give all the detail to "help others judge the.
Pinker's previous book The Language Instinct succeeded here precisely where HTMW fails, and for exactly this reason: the earlier book drew on a forty-year consensus about generative grammar patiently constructed by Noam Chomsky and colleagues, while HTMW forces one prematurely. So when we wrote "You need not believe a word of it" we meant just that: Evolutionary psychology does not force your hand or your mind here. You ought to judge for yourself.
Pinker could have helped that judgment by presenting alternative explanations antithetical to his views in enough detail. But he didn't. Of course some people still "believe" in it-though it is important to clear about just what they believe. All we needed to illustrate was a lack of consensus to make our point that his reporting was skewed. According to David Marr's former colleagues, Profs. Shimon Ullman, Tomaso Poggio, Berthold Horn, and Eric Grimson, who, together with Marr, came up with the notion of 'visible surface representation' known as the "2H-D sketch" it was meant to be an integrated representation for surfaces on the way to object recognition.
HTMW 's picture on page , which depicts the 2H-D sketch as a circle and then writes out separate, distinct slots for depth, slant, tilt, color, and surface identification is misleading. Visual surface reconstruction seemingly does matter for certain low-level visual tasks like figure-ground separation, but not, according to Ullman, Poggio, and Heinrich Buetlehoff, for object recognition, not even for 3-D.
Further, there is really no hard biological evidence for such a surface representation-scientists simply have not found neurons that respond to surface orientation regardless of where it's coming from. Evidently, neurons behave differently. But our point was not to quibble about these details or history: it was simply to point out that nobody had gotten the integrated representation to work which of course does not bar somebody else from trying to make it work , and that this integrated representation is not a consensus in the field.
Gerhart and M. Kirschner, Cells, Embryos, and Evolution. Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. It also means that we rely on you, our readers, for support.
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Donate Today. Like the Project, two new books on the David Waldstreicher. Justin H. Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality Robin Dembroff , Dee Payton. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd , Nadia Marzouki. So vulgar a dismissal of several thousand years of human science and philosophy reflects only the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of this way of thinking.
But real brains deal with meaning, meaning given to sensory inputs by the working of the brain, based on experience provided through evolutionary and developmental history. Hence, just as for his mentors, each module or piece of behaviour is constructed by and in the interests of genes.
But real humans, like all other living organisms, grow and develop, creating themselves through the dynamic interplay of DNA, the cellular orchestra in which DNA is embedded, and the larger world outside.
Modularity, if it exists, emerges dynamically. So what are these modules? The Stone Age they portray has something of the Flintstones about it — American suburban mores transported into the dim past.
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