How People Work
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How people work A review of “How the Mind Works” by Steven Pinker by Christopher G. D. Tipper $Date: Sunday, 22nd August 2004$
I
SAW Steven Pinker present a more recent book of his last year at Britain’s annual Hay Literary Festival, held in June at Hay-on-Wye. A dapper man, with a preRaphaelite coiffure, Pinker made a persuasive case for a return of sanity to our thinking about what it means to be human and makes a strong case against the damage that has been wrought by right-on left-wing ideologues in the fields of education, psychology and social policy. After finishing “The Blank Slate” (PinkerB, 2003) my appetite was whetted for his earlier work on language and the human mind. Professor Pinker is not a philosopher of the mind, nor a practising neuroscientist, but he has a rare gift for exposing some of the flaws in prior thinking on human nature, and brings the reader up to date on the academic debates that have raged over the last 20 years or so. I now know that the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate has been superseded, and I can start to see the signs of real progress in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. It is worth pointing out that “How the Mind Works” (PinkerA, 1999) does not pretend to be a blue-print for the human brain, nor is it an introduction to cognitive psychology. However, it has a number of useful things to say on visual perception, evolution and computational theories of the mind. It is also a platform for the pursuit of scientific reason in the social-sciences. Many mistakes have been made in the past, and Pinker exposes more than a few crackpot theories. He starts by launching into a crash-course on evolutionary biology, a theory that has been consistently misrepresented by the popular media and creationists. I find Pinker’s discussion of evolution more cogent than Dawkins’ in “The Blind Watchmaker” (Dawkins, 1988) which I read a number of years ago. He makes the point clear for example that evolution is not an argument for design or teleology, that is the argument that individual organisms are best adapted to their environment. What happens is actually rather subtle, and I didn’t think too deeply when I read Dawkins. What Charles Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russell-Wallace were proposing was the idea that species adapt to their environment, rather than individual organisms, and furthermore that this does not imply Design. Small perturbations of inherited characteristics, caused by random shuffling of the genes during reproduction and/or mutations in the genes, follow a blind search of characteristics going forward, but only those organisms that are successful survive to breed and pass on the changes to a new generation. This clever piece of backward-looking adaptation produces the very results of forward teleology called for by creationists. There is no need for a Grand Designer, and the results of evolution are only partially adaptational, more the result
1
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How people work of blind-chance coupled with natural selection. This is an important argument, and one I have never seen expressed as clearly as Pinker does. Pinker’s arguments for the computational theory of the mind also side-step my fundamental objections to hard-AI and the idea that we can program intelligent behaviour. I am now aware just how naïve earlier theories of the mind actually were in that they posited no mechanism whatsoever for human cognition. The computational theory however brings with it the fundamental notions of information theory, and opens up a lot of mysteries surrounding what it means to be human.
Computational Dynamics In a long chapter on visual perception, Pinker shows that our visual system is welladapted to solving under-defined visual recognition tasks by bringing a range of different ‘modules’ to bear on the problem of turning a stereoscopic 2-D image in the retinas into what Pinker calls a 2½-D model in the brain. Each module has different assumptions about the visual field, and by expounding on research into visual illusions, Pinker goes some of the way in showing how the modules interact. Of course nobody is going to be building a model of the brain any time soon, but Pinker makes some important points. We now know for example that thoughts are not pure imagery, and that the verbal centres of the brain also play a part in abstract reasoning. This may not sound revolutionary, but the idea that we can only know from the evidence of our senses has a long pedigree going back to Bishop Berkeley. This is now known to be wrong, which is progress of a kind. It is only by bringing a comprehensive toolbox of tricks to bear on some ferociously complex visual problems that we can make any sense whatsoever of the world around us. His remarks in the chapter “Good Ideas” on the link between formal scientific reasoning and our evolutionary heritage are interesting, but they do not surprise me. I have always used a visual intuition in my reasoning and mathematics arrived fairly naturally in my teenage years. It is interesting that much of our language is built up from notions of space in the sense of motion through space and notions of location (see the section “The Metaphorical Mind”), but not terribly useful from a linguistic point of view, more an insight into our cognitive processes. I can’t help harbouring a sneaking sympathy towards the beliefs of Alfred RussellWallace, because Pinker has only explained the easy cases—analytical thought. Wallace, the co-inspiritor of evolutionary theory with Darwin, ended his life as a confirmed creationist. He could not understand the paradox that the tremendous complexity of the human brain had evolved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that there were no apparent differences in the intellectual capacity of stone-age tribes that had been studied by anthropologists in the 19th Century and modern technological man. Pinker leaves whole areas of cognitive capacity unexamined until the last chapter. He makes a case merely for rational pursuits like logic and mathematics. In the last 2
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How people work chapter he offers six motivations for music, the linguistic urge, the analysis of a soundscape, emotional calls—everything from growling of blues musicians to the evocative strains of a movie soundtrack—what he calls ‘habitat selection’, rhythm and motor co-ordination and a last category he graciously calls ‘something else’. This last category is a tacit admission that this theory is only a preliminary draft. We simply do not know enough about neuroscience to understand the fundamental processes that go on in the brain when we comprehend music. But Pinker makes a brave first attempt. Likewise my own enthusiasm for literature is left unmoved by a similarly utilitarian analysis of the complexity of the literary oeuvre, from the 36 plot-templates ‘discovered’ by Georges Polti, to the risible claim that we are trying to discover stratagems for dealing with real life. The plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is valuable in its own right, and I need no advice on avoiding parricide nor incest. Indeed to anyone who is not a scientist, literature is perfectly normal, and could be seen as an essential human activity. People tell stories when they mean to instruct, motivate or gain status. One could even make a case that most of economics is a story about commerce, and GDP data a plot-line in an economic drama. Of course, unlike novelists, economists believe that the story they are telling has some factual basis. But the writer of a dry academic paper and a novelist are in the end telling a story about the world. Whether that world exists is up to the reader to judge. As somebody with a thorough scientific education, and consequently burdened, like Professor Pinker, with something of a tin-ear when it comes to poetry, I can only marvel at the myriad accomplishments of a Salman Rushdie, an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Steinbeck. From Pinker’s viewpoint these talents are innately mysterious, and demand something more substantial than this gaggle of partially supported conjectures. I would question if answers to these questions lie outside the purview of science completely, if by science one means a reductive and analytical construct designed to provide instruments to discover the physical universe. I am convinced that a true scholar knows the limits of the utilitarian viewpoint espoused by so much economic theory and, it appears from this account, social psychology also.
Why do fools fall in love? Chapter 6 “Hotheads” where Pinker tackles the subject of the emotions is perhaps the most disappointing part of this book. It really amounts to little more than a collection of “just-so” stories about how we compete for health, wealth and happiness. Indeed his account of romantic love exhibited the worst signs of simple-minded reductionism and I find his description of marriage as a calculation by interested parties for mutual gratification and the propagation of genes the sort of thing that only an emotionally inept male scientist could contemplate. Romantic love has almost become a kind of appendix, in this account, which serves no evolutionary purpose and must be excised in the brave new world of scientific rationalism. Could it be that such 3
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work ‘madness’ itself fulfils an evolutionary purpose in a highly abstract calculation of ‘fitness’ of the opposite partner and that it is as successful in selecting an appropriate mate as the putative size of their bank-account? Just because the phenomenology of love is experienced by the interior-self without reference to the analytical tools of the men in white coats does not make it irrelevant to a true science of the emotions. And yet Pinker ducks the issues and falls into the behaviourist trap of dismissing a hard problem as trivial, lacking in objectivity and thus missing the point. Perhaps Pinker is only implicitly acknowledging the admonishment of Ludwig Wittgenstein: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” 1 On one point Pinker must be closer to the truth than many ne’er do well social reformers in his claim that emotions are essentially bound in with the process of cognition and are innate in our goals and stratagems. Thus anger is a legitimate strategy in competition for scarce resources, and desire an essential route to achieving our goals. Scientists (not to mention economists) have wondered long and hard at why we are so willing to sacrifice long-term profit for short-term gain, but if we realise that life is essentially a lottery, it is often perfectly rational to “take the money and run”. A bird in the hand really is sometimes better than two birds in the bush. Pinker’s account of the monetary roots of happiness has been updated recently. There is indeed a loose correlation between wealth and happiness. It seems in light of more recent research, however, that causation in fact flows in the opposite direction, and that wealth follows from happiness and not the other way around, as in the popular imagination.
Social intercourse Further on in the seventh chapter “Family Values”, Pinker goes some way to redressing my reservations about his comments on more complex emotions like romantic love. By this point he has moved far away from examining the nature of cognition, probably because our knowledge is so incomplete, and it suits his purposes to lay down some shibboleths of social science. Not having been involved in the debates he describes I find it very difficult to decide whether he is playing the part of a prophet in the wilderness nor whether social psychologists are really as ideologically driven as he claims, and that educational policy, social science and psychology really have been hijacked by a band of left-wing nut-cases as it appears from his account. This account of parent-child conflict seems perfectly reasonable and accords with common reason, but it seems that social scientists have passed up more than a few blind alleys in establishing the modern standpoint on human nature. From this book and also my reading of “The Blank Slate”, Pinker’s more recent work, the history of anthropology is littered with the corpses of crackpot theories and wrong-headed accounts of utopianistic stone-age and pastoral societies. Margaret Mead, someone whose repu1
Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus (1922) preface.
4
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work tation has passed beyond the boundaries of anthropology, seems a particularly stupid and/or naïve advocate of the myth of the Garden of Eden. On page 426 is a devastating account of flawed science by this woman, who described at various times a group of head-hunters as “gentle” and whose account of the idyllic life of Samoan islanders seems in retrospect to have been complete fiction. It is breathtaking that fantasists of this order are allowed to propagate their research and receive public acclaim for what amounts to a skein of lies. The following chapter “Family Values” contains some of the boldest assertions of the whole book. Pinker has ‘got’ evolution, and like every true believer the result brings on a bout of cognitive dissonance that leaves the reader checking his sense of reality at the door. Admittedly, many of Pinker’s assertions affect a grain of truth, but the view through Darwin’s spectacles is bleak and only explain the superficial reality of human relations. Apparently human male testicles are statistically larger than a gorilla’s due to cheating females in man’s ancestral past, sperm having to compete in the womb with other men’s sperm. Our testicles are smaller though than chimpanzees, because women were more faithful than female chimps. Such assertions are circumstantial at best, and these pages are littered with such factoids. I wonder if Darwinian theorists are under the illusion that they are exploring anything profoundly interesting at all. Nothing in this chapter surprises this writer, and most conclusions are banal to say the least. I expect my science to hold more insight than such a set of ad hoc justifications. On top of that, Pinker ignores whole classes of personal relationships where genes are of no significance whatsoever. What about all those people who voted for Tony Blair, is Pinker really asserting that they ‘fancied’ him? I suspect the theorising of evolutionary biologists has no bearing whatsoever on the practise of politics in a modern mass-media democracy. Likewise, I am a first born child, and Pinker suggests that statistically I should be something of a conservative and a bully. Poppycock to that! I despise traditionalists and have never punched anyone in my life. This chapter should be taken with a large pinch-of-salt. In keeping with the grandiose title of the book, the last chapter is tantalisingly entitled “The Meaning of Life”. By this point the reader has travelled on an odyssey through evolutionary biology and has started to ask some searching questions. Pinker does acknowledge that there are hard problems remaining to be solved. As alluded to above he makes an attempt to delineate our fondness for music, why literature holds enduring appeal and where the sense of humour comes from. He comes out with some typically ascerbic remarks about religious sentiment and then concludes the book in a satisfying manner by alluding to our evolutionary heritage and pondering that there may indeed be problems (he quotes the self, free-will, consciousness and the nature of meaning) that man is unequipped to understand. It is nice to see a scientist admitting defeat. And it is an honourable one at that. Only a rational man has the courage to admit that 5
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work there are things that will remain ultimately mysterious. Pinker claims to have solved everything else. No proper book review would end without a conclusion. Whether I would recommend this book is up to the reader to decide. It certainly started a process of inquiry. The writing is leavened with humour throughout, and it always helps when you feel like inviting the author around for dinner at the end. However, I must confess that the struggle was not quite worth it. I have had more than a few prejudices reinforced by Pinker’s unremittingly rational and analytical pose. His comments on literature read like a critique of German cuisine written by a vegetarian. His attack on religious experience is entirely predictable coming as it does from a member of the scientific establishment, but in the end is just as dogmatic and uncomprehending as the most ardent spiritualism. The Universe is ultimately mysterious, and a scientist who pretends to have all the answers is a charlatan. Luckily Professor Pinker is too humane to vilify his intellectual opponents in the priggish fashion of a Richard Dawkins. Here’s hoping that there are many more similarly thought- provoking works in the pipeline.
6
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work
Bibliography R. Dawkins, (1988), The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin Books Ltd. S. Pinker, (1999), How the Mind Works, London: Penguin Books Ltd. S. Pinker, (2003), The Blank Slate, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2004 Christopher G. D. Tipper. All rights reserved.
7
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
I
SAW Steven Pinker present a more recent book of his last year at Britain’s annual Hay Literary Festival, held in June at Hay-on-Wye. A dapper man, with a preRaphaelite coiffure, Pinker made a persuasive case for a return of sanity to our thinking about what it means to be human and makes a strong case against the damage that has been wrought by right-on left-wing ideologues in the fields of education, psychology and social policy. After finishing “The Blank Slate” (PinkerB, 2003) my appetite was whetted for his earlier work on language and the human mind. Professor Pinker is not a philosopher of the mind, nor a practising neuroscientist, but he has a rare gift for exposing some of the flaws in prior thinking on human nature, and brings the reader up to date on the academic debates that have raged over the last 20 years or so. I now know that the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate has been superseded, and I can start to see the signs of real progress in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. It is worth pointing out that “How the Mind Works” (PinkerA, 1999) does not pretend to be a blue-print for the human brain, nor is it an introduction to cognitive psychology. However, it has a number of useful things to say on visual perception, evolution and computational theories of the mind. It is also a platform for the pursuit of scientific reason in the social-sciences. Many mistakes have been made in the past, and Pinker exposes more than a few crackpot theories. He starts by launching into a crash-course on evolutionary biology, a theory that has been consistently misrepresented by the popular media and creationists. I find Pinker’s discussion of evolution more cogent than Dawkins’ in “The Blind Watchmaker” (Dawkins, 1988) which I read a number of years ago. He makes the point clear for example that evolution is not an argument for design or teleology, that is the argument that individual organisms are best adapted to their environment. What happens is actually rather subtle, and I didn’t think too deeply when I read Dawkins. What Charles Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russell-Wallace were proposing was the idea that species adapt to their environment, rather than individual organisms, and furthermore that this does not imply Design. Small perturbations of inherited characteristics, caused by random shuffling of the genes during reproduction and/or mutations in the genes, follow a blind search of characteristics going forward, but only those organisms that are successful survive to breed and pass on the changes to a new generation. This clever piece of backward-looking adaptation produces the very results of forward teleology called for by creationists. There is no need for a Grand Designer, and the results of evolution are only partially adaptational, more the result
1
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work of blind-chance coupled with natural selection. This is an important argument, and one I have never seen expressed as clearly as Pinker does. Pinker’s arguments for the computational theory of the mind also side-step my fundamental objections to hard-AI and the idea that we can program intelligent behaviour. I am now aware just how naïve earlier theories of the mind actually were in that they posited no mechanism whatsoever for human cognition. The computational theory however brings with it the fundamental notions of information theory, and opens up a lot of mysteries surrounding what it means to be human.
Computational Dynamics In a long chapter on visual perception, Pinker shows that our visual system is welladapted to solving under-defined visual recognition tasks by bringing a range of different ‘modules’ to bear on the problem of turning a stereoscopic 2-D image in the retinas into what Pinker calls a 2½-D model in the brain. Each module has different assumptions about the visual field, and by expounding on research into visual illusions, Pinker goes some of the way in showing how the modules interact. Of course nobody is going to be building a model of the brain any time soon, but Pinker makes some important points. We now know for example that thoughts are not pure imagery, and that the verbal centres of the brain also play a part in abstract reasoning. This may not sound revolutionary, but the idea that we can only know from the evidence of our senses has a long pedigree going back to Bishop Berkeley. This is now known to be wrong, which is progress of a kind. It is only by bringing a comprehensive toolbox of tricks to bear on some ferociously complex visual problems that we can make any sense whatsoever of the world around us. His remarks in the chapter “Good Ideas” on the link between formal scientific reasoning and our evolutionary heritage are interesting, but they do not surprise me. I have always used a visual intuition in my reasoning and mathematics arrived fairly naturally in my teenage years. It is interesting that much of our language is built up from notions of space in the sense of motion through space and notions of location (see the section “The Metaphorical Mind”), but not terribly useful from a linguistic point of view, more an insight into our cognitive processes. I can’t help harbouring a sneaking sympathy towards the beliefs of Alfred RussellWallace, because Pinker has only explained the easy cases—analytical thought. Wallace, the co-inspiritor of evolutionary theory with Darwin, ended his life as a confirmed creationist. He could not understand the paradox that the tremendous complexity of the human brain had evolved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and that there were no apparent differences in the intellectual capacity of stone-age tribes that had been studied by anthropologists in the 19th Century and modern technological man. Pinker leaves whole areas of cognitive capacity unexamined until the last chapter. He makes a case merely for rational pursuits like logic and mathematics. In the last 2
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work chapter he offers six motivations for music, the linguistic urge, the analysis of a soundscape, emotional calls—everything from growling of blues musicians to the evocative strains of a movie soundtrack—what he calls ‘habitat selection’, rhythm and motor co-ordination and a last category he graciously calls ‘something else’. This last category is a tacit admission that this theory is only a preliminary draft. We simply do not know enough about neuroscience to understand the fundamental processes that go on in the brain when we comprehend music. But Pinker makes a brave first attempt. Likewise my own enthusiasm for literature is left unmoved by a similarly utilitarian analysis of the complexity of the literary oeuvre, from the 36 plot-templates ‘discovered’ by Georges Polti, to the risible claim that we are trying to discover stratagems for dealing with real life. The plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is valuable in its own right, and I need no advice on avoiding parricide nor incest. Indeed to anyone who is not a scientist, literature is perfectly normal, and could be seen as an essential human activity. People tell stories when they mean to instruct, motivate or gain status. One could even make a case that most of economics is a story about commerce, and GDP data a plot-line in an economic drama. Of course, unlike novelists, economists believe that the story they are telling has some factual basis. But the writer of a dry academic paper and a novelist are in the end telling a story about the world. Whether that world exists is up to the reader to judge. As somebody with a thorough scientific education, and consequently burdened, like Professor Pinker, with something of a tin-ear when it comes to poetry, I can only marvel at the myriad accomplishments of a Salman Rushdie, an F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Steinbeck. From Pinker’s viewpoint these talents are innately mysterious, and demand something more substantial than this gaggle of partially supported conjectures. I would question if answers to these questions lie outside the purview of science completely, if by science one means a reductive and analytical construct designed to provide instruments to discover the physical universe. I am convinced that a true scholar knows the limits of the utilitarian viewpoint espoused by so much economic theory and, it appears from this account, social psychology also.
Why do fools fall in love? Chapter 6 “Hotheads” where Pinker tackles the subject of the emotions is perhaps the most disappointing part of this book. It really amounts to little more than a collection of “just-so” stories about how we compete for health, wealth and happiness. Indeed his account of romantic love exhibited the worst signs of simple-minded reductionism and I find his description of marriage as a calculation by interested parties for mutual gratification and the propagation of genes the sort of thing that only an emotionally inept male scientist could contemplate. Romantic love has almost become a kind of appendix, in this account, which serves no evolutionary purpose and must be excised in the brave new world of scientific rationalism. Could it be that such 3
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work ‘madness’ itself fulfils an evolutionary purpose in a highly abstract calculation of ‘fitness’ of the opposite partner and that it is as successful in selecting an appropriate mate as the putative size of their bank-account? Just because the phenomenology of love is experienced by the interior-self without reference to the analytical tools of the men in white coats does not make it irrelevant to a true science of the emotions. And yet Pinker ducks the issues and falls into the behaviourist trap of dismissing a hard problem as trivial, lacking in objectivity and thus missing the point. Perhaps Pinker is only implicitly acknowledging the admonishment of Ludwig Wittgenstein: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” 1 On one point Pinker must be closer to the truth than many ne’er do well social reformers in his claim that emotions are essentially bound in with the process of cognition and are innate in our goals and stratagems. Thus anger is a legitimate strategy in competition for scarce resources, and desire an essential route to achieving our goals. Scientists (not to mention economists) have wondered long and hard at why we are so willing to sacrifice long-term profit for short-term gain, but if we realise that life is essentially a lottery, it is often perfectly rational to “take the money and run”. A bird in the hand really is sometimes better than two birds in the bush. Pinker’s account of the monetary roots of happiness has been updated recently. There is indeed a loose correlation between wealth and happiness. It seems in light of more recent research, however, that causation in fact flows in the opposite direction, and that wealth follows from happiness and not the other way around, as in the popular imagination.
Social intercourse Further on in the seventh chapter “Family Values”, Pinker goes some way to redressing my reservations about his comments on more complex emotions like romantic love. By this point he has moved far away from examining the nature of cognition, probably because our knowledge is so incomplete, and it suits his purposes to lay down some shibboleths of social science. Not having been involved in the debates he describes I find it very difficult to decide whether he is playing the part of a prophet in the wilderness nor whether social psychologists are really as ideologically driven as he claims, and that educational policy, social science and psychology really have been hijacked by a band of left-wing nut-cases as it appears from his account. This account of parent-child conflict seems perfectly reasonable and accords with common reason, but it seems that social scientists have passed up more than a few blind alleys in establishing the modern standpoint on human nature. From this book and also my reading of “The Blank Slate”, Pinker’s more recent work, the history of anthropology is littered with the corpses of crackpot theories and wrong-headed accounts of utopianistic stone-age and pastoral societies. Margaret Mead, someone whose repu1
Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus (1922) preface.
4
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work tation has passed beyond the boundaries of anthropology, seems a particularly stupid and/or naïve advocate of the myth of the Garden of Eden. On page 426 is a devastating account of flawed science by this woman, who described at various times a group of head-hunters as “gentle” and whose account of the idyllic life of Samoan islanders seems in retrospect to have been complete fiction. It is breathtaking that fantasists of this order are allowed to propagate their research and receive public acclaim for what amounts to a skein of lies. The following chapter “Family Values” contains some of the boldest assertions of the whole book. Pinker has ‘got’ evolution, and like every true believer the result brings on a bout of cognitive dissonance that leaves the reader checking his sense of reality at the door. Admittedly, many of Pinker’s assertions affect a grain of truth, but the view through Darwin’s spectacles is bleak and only explain the superficial reality of human relations. Apparently human male testicles are statistically larger than a gorilla’s due to cheating females in man’s ancestral past, sperm having to compete in the womb with other men’s sperm. Our testicles are smaller though than chimpanzees, because women were more faithful than female chimps. Such assertions are circumstantial at best, and these pages are littered with such factoids. I wonder if Darwinian theorists are under the illusion that they are exploring anything profoundly interesting at all. Nothing in this chapter surprises this writer, and most conclusions are banal to say the least. I expect my science to hold more insight than such a set of ad hoc justifications. On top of that, Pinker ignores whole classes of personal relationships where genes are of no significance whatsoever. What about all those people who voted for Tony Blair, is Pinker really asserting that they ‘fancied’ him? I suspect the theorising of evolutionary biologists has no bearing whatsoever on the practise of politics in a modern mass-media democracy. Likewise, I am a first born child, and Pinker suggests that statistically I should be something of a conservative and a bully. Poppycock to that! I despise traditionalists and have never punched anyone in my life. This chapter should be taken with a large pinch-of-salt. In keeping with the grandiose title of the book, the last chapter is tantalisingly entitled “The Meaning of Life”. By this point the reader has travelled on an odyssey through evolutionary biology and has started to ask some searching questions. Pinker does acknowledge that there are hard problems remaining to be solved. As alluded to above he makes an attempt to delineate our fondness for music, why literature holds enduring appeal and where the sense of humour comes from. He comes out with some typically ascerbic remarks about religious sentiment and then concludes the book in a satisfying manner by alluding to our evolutionary heritage and pondering that there may indeed be problems (he quotes the self, free-will, consciousness and the nature of meaning) that man is unequipped to understand. It is nice to see a scientist admitting defeat. And it is an honourable one at that. Only a rational man has the courage to admit that 5
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work there are things that will remain ultimately mysterious. Pinker claims to have solved everything else. No proper book review would end without a conclusion. Whether I would recommend this book is up to the reader to decide. It certainly started a process of inquiry. The writing is leavened with humour throughout, and it always helps when you feel like inviting the author around for dinner at the end. However, I must confess that the struggle was not quite worth it. I have had more than a few prejudices reinforced by Pinker’s unremittingly rational and analytical pose. His comments on literature read like a critique of German cuisine written by a vegetarian. His attack on religious experience is entirely predictable coming as it does from a member of the scientific establishment, but in the end is just as dogmatic and uncomprehending as the most ardent spiritualism. The Universe is ultimately mysterious, and a scientist who pretends to have all the answers is a charlatan. Luckily Professor Pinker is too humane to vilify his intellectual opponents in the priggish fashion of a Richard Dawkins. Here’s hoping that there are many more similarly thought- provoking works in the pipeline.
6
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
How people work
Bibliography R. Dawkins, (1988), The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin Books Ltd. S. Pinker, (1999), How the Mind Works, London: Penguin Books Ltd. S. Pinker, (2003), The Blank Slate, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2004 Christopher G. D. Tipper. All rights reserved.
7
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.renderx.com/
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