Greg Detre
Sunday, 12 May, 2002
�The author responds to Robert C. Berwick and Jeremy C.
Ahouse's review of How the Mind Works.� � Steven Pinker in The Boston Review
�How the Mind Works is a synthesis of cognitive science and evolutionary biology that aims to explain the human mind with three ideas:
�the book lays out criteria for attributing an evolutionary function to a trait, and applies them to many hypotheses�
Berwick + Alhouse dismiss the book entirely. "Don't believe a word of it" � why?
�some scientists disagree with 1., and assert that the mind is a direct product of the biochemistry of the brain�
but Berwick himself takes a computational view of language
some �disagree with 2., and assert that there is a generic neural network learning algorithm which the brain uses for every mental process�
but Berwick works within a Chomskyan framework
�and Berwick cannot be opposed in principle to examining the phylogenetic basis of mental faculties, since he himself has recently done just that for language�
�There remains an issue of which mental processes are functional adaptations, as opposed to by-products of adaptations or the result of chance�
�The review is the latest example of a conventional genre in modern intellectual life: the all-out attack by Lewontin or his collaborators (including Steven Rose, Stephen Jay Gould, and Philip Kitcher) on attempts to connect psychology with standard evolutionary biology�
Distortion 1: that Pinker uncritically believes that all traits are adaptations.
Distortion 2: I am an atomist and a genetic reductionist, reducing every behavior to a simple trait, and then, in a straight line, to a single gene
Distortion 3: HTMW is just story-telling, and presents no basis for evaluating its hypotheses about the biological function of mental faculties
�The adaptationist question, 'What is the function of a given structure or organ?' has been for centuries the basis of every advance in physiology �� (Mayer)
e.g. �Harvey's question 'Why are there valves in the veins?' was a major stepping stone in his discovery of the circulation of blood.� (Mayer)
��I present standard criteria in biology for evaluating hypotheses about adaptive function�
�A good adaptationist explanation specifies a goal relevant to survival or reproduction, the causal structure of the organism's environment, and the engineering designs suited to attain that goal in that environment. It then requires empirical data showing that the trait in question uncannily meets the engineering specs, showing signs of complexity, effectiveness, and specialization in solving the assigned problem, especially in comparison with alternative designs that are biologically possible for that kind of organism�
he says that A&B ignore all his empirical evidence and accuse him of telling autobiographical stories
see the selection below about parental investment
lastly, �a major conclusion of HTMW is that many of the most momentous human activities do not meet the criteria for adaptations, including written language, dreams, science, mathematics, music, art, religion, philosophy, and most narrative�
Marr�s 2H-D sketch
personality as genetically caused vs correlated
population genetics
�Darwin first noticed an asymmetry in mating in much of the animal kingdom: males compete, females choose. In the 1960s and 1970s George Williams, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers provided an elegant explanation in terms of parental investment: whichever sex invests more in offspring becomes a limiting resource for the other, and so the less-investing sex competes, the greater-investing sex chooses. In 1979 Donald Symons amassed a vast set of data on human sexuality that supported this theory, refuted competing adaptationist hypotheses, and made many new predictions about promiscuity, jealousy, mate selection, and physical attractiveness. In the 1980s and 1990s these predictions were tested in laboratory experiments, sociological data, in vivo field studies, surveys of the ethnographic literature, and cross-cultural surveys involving tens of thousands of people in thirty-seven cultures-and largely confirmed (pp. 460-93). A&B make no mention of these empirical tests, preferring snide, ad hominem remarks.�