BOOKS
A revolution under way
Hugh Lawson-Tancred
HOW THE MIND WORKS by Steven Pinker Allen Lane, £25, pp. 660 Do you enjoy the view of a well laid- out park, a gently undulating landscape with good prospects in all directions, well watered and with ample grass and other vegetable cover and with just the right number of tall and shadowy trees? If, like the overwhelming majority of us, you do, this may well be because your tastes in landscape are conditioned by the preference of your hunter-gatherer fore- bears for environments offering good scope for forage and likely to attract large and edible herbivores while at the same time affording the opportunity of early detection (from the prospects) and evasion (up the trees) of predatory hominivores. And if the theory of evolutionary psychology is correct, it should in principle be possible to give a similar aetiology of almost all our other dispositions and penchants, from the trivial to the central.
The theory that consideration of the selective pressures conditioning the sur- vival of our species in its immensely long foraging phase can yield a detailed account of the innate structure of the minds of modern men and women is presented with extraordinary lucidity, cogency and panache in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. This is certainly one of the most impressive works of accessible (as opposed to popular) science even of the present golden age and is in all ways a worthy suc- cessor to his admirable presentation of modern linguistics in The Language Instinct.
The theory of evolutionary psychology, though first broached by Darwin himself, has been slow to mature. This is to a large extent because it is confronted by the determined opposition of a consensus of opinion that cannot or will not stomach the idea that selective pressures could account for anything as elaborate and apparently to a large extent gratuitous as human behaviour. Since their inception, the social sciences have been dominated by the arti- cle of faith that biological constraints are at best theoretical boundaries to the evolu- tionary space for a development of society and personality that is essentially the prod- uct of 'cultural' factors. The other reason, however, for the long gestation of evolu- tionary psychology is that the pressures shaping the innate structure of the mind can only be studied when it has become generally agreed that there is such innate structure available for detailed scientific examination. And that only became possi- ble with the arrival of the computational theory of mind which is the core of the joint enterprises of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. How the Mind Works is, in effect, a celebration of the marriage of the two most important ideas in the entire history of the life sciences: evolution through the natural selection of genetic replicators and the production of the phenomenon of mind by a brain orchestrat- ed as a suite of modular dedicated information processors.
There will, of course, be those who dis- like the idea that we are merely a barrage of natural computers programmed by the undignified discomforts of our ancestral habitat. It may be considered an affront to the religious and moral conception of man. Anyone who thinks this is to be pitied in that he or she is allowing an unreasonable confusion of the study of human nature with the moral and spiritual assessment of human values to prevent him or her from enjoying the chance to witness one of the major advances in human thinking, the pre- sent cognitive revolution, which is offering the possibility of a completely new and enormously more satisfying conception of the complex structures that we are and the forces that drive us. There are many elo- quent exponents of the conception of human nature that is based on the beauti- ful theory of integrated modular informa- tion processing, but none has yet succeeded in putting together so powerful and grip- ping a summum cognitivum as Pinker. How the Mind Works surveys almost the entire range of computational modelling of the cognitive and affective mind. To have read it is to have consulted a first draft of the structural plan of the human psyche. As this plan evolves, it will become apparent that to live a human life, still more to run a human society, without it is like trying to maintain an airliner without its technical specifications.
What makes cognitive science revolu- tionary is that across a whole range of men- tal activities, from sense perception, to language, to problem-solving, to emotional and aesthetic responses, it has converted many questions traditionally classed as mysteries to which no answer is even in principle possible (and the cherishing of whose mysterious status is a large part of what we call Romanticism), into problems which are, to be sure, baffling in their com- plexity but which may be expected to yield to the co-operative persistence of scientific research. The paradigms of such conver- sion lie in the fields of sense perception and language use, and, having covered the latter in his previous book, Pinker devotes a long chapter to the best studied and understood of the senses, vision. Research into vision has made extraordinary progress, and we now understand a great deal about how the eye achieves the appar- ently impossible feat of 'inverse optics', inferring the shape and arrangements of objects in three-dimensional space from the pattern of illumination of the two- dimensional retina, through the use of a set of assumptions, what Pinker calls a 'cheat- sheet', about the environmental parame- ters, which is regularly circumvented by the illusions of television and cinema, and whose detailed contents are turning out to be best explained by our early foraging predicament.
It is in connection with vision (and lan- guage) that the project of reverse engineer- ing the mind, inferring the functional structure of the brain from its observed performance, has so far yielded its most spectacular results. As he is well aware, when Pinker moves on to deal with such aspects of the affective mind as sexual roles and attractions, feelings of disgust and beauty (including that of landscape) and the dynamics of the family, he is on much less secure and also much more provoca- tive ground. In following out his master assumption that our emotions provide our high-level strategic objectives in pursuing the evolutionary interest of maximising the number of our genes present in the next generation (an interest that shapes the design of our minds, of course, not our conscious intentions and projects), Pinker argues, for example, that men and women must have different attitudes to sexual promiscuity (since men need many, but women only one, partner to maximise genetic replication), which will enrage certain feminists, and that one half of per- sonality is determined by genetics and almost all the other by the logic of parent- child conflict (whereby family life is a game in which each player seeks to maximise the survival of his or her genes in whatever combination of bodies is most feasible), which will be anathema to those who will not allow personality and performance to be determined by anything other than cul- ture and conditioning.
These theories make for immensely entertaining reading and are, I suspect, in many details wrong. Is it really the case that evolutionary interest predisposes eldest children to be conservative and authoritarian? We can all muster anecdotal counter-examples. But such claims are text- book illustrations of what Karl Popper labelled 'bold hypotheses', interesting and non-obvious generalisations which are eminently open to empirical refutation. And their defence certainly produces fascinating evidence, such as that scientists sympathetic to the Origin of Species were ten times more likely to be second or later children than to be eldest ones.
Indeed, what is most astonishing about this book is not its compendious range and facility in expounding the ideas of others but the extraordinary vigour of its reason- ing and of its use of telling examples and illustrations. For this, Pinker draws heavily on popular culture and, although not all the references will be familiar (who is this Gazza?), only those will object who insist that important scientific findings be pre- sented exclusively in the stuffily pompous tones of academic journals. The work is no less glittering a tour de force than The Language Instinct, remarkably so for a book of more than 600 pages.
The last chapter, on the higher pursuits, is the least convincing. Music has been the most studied of the arts from a computa- tional perspective and we understand most about the structure of our response to it, but in evolutionary terms it remains, as Pinker admits, an enigma. On humour and comedy, too, an aura of conjecture replaces the magisterial certainty of the earlier pre- sentation. One mild complaint relates to the treatment of religion, which, though with none of the militant acidity of Dawkins, is dismissive. Why, when he is so
punctilious in castigating the naturalistic fallacy of supposing that any moral `theory' could derive sustenance from any finding of the life sciences, does he appear not to accept that nothing in the research that he reviews is incompatible with a religious response to the world? This is all the stranger in that, as he acknowledges, the problemification of so much of the reper- toire of the mind throws into still sharper focus the mysterious status of its most con- spicuous hallmark, consciousness. One does not have to be a Cartesian, however, to feel that, in some sense, if we do not understand consciousness we understand nothing.
We are in the middle of a revolution in our understanding of human nature. This revolution may be compared to the change of our conception of the universe produced by the discoveries of quantum physics and relativity. Unlike them, however, it deals with the immediate contents of our lives, uses reasonably accessible concepts and does not involve prohibitive amounts of public money for further progress. Nevertheless, there is a wide level of gener- al ignorance about the very occurrence of these momentous changes. I predict that historians of the future will conclude that the publication of How the Mind Works was the breakthrough for introducing the cognitive conception of man to the mass audience that it so richly deserves.
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