“How the Mind Works”

While I read this book, I kept thinking “This guy is good!”  He’s able to go from quoting famous top philosophers to quoting infamous pop philanderers!   Yes, his style is a little crass at times, but it makes for fun reading.   Here are some of selected quips about the book;

P. 9  If you look closely at the little stick figure style head, you’ll notice what looks like a crazy head of hair reminiscent of the author's.  A great example of Steven Pinker infusing his own style into the book.

P. 434   “Daly and Wilson found that step parenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified.  In the case of the worst abuse, homicide, a stepparent is forty to a hundred times more likely than a biological parent to kill a young child, even when confounding factors-poverty, the mother’s age, the traits of people who tend to remarry-are taken into account.” 

 An excellent example of this paradigm's ability to find fascinating information.  This link is an article from the Arizona Republic.  I read it every once in a while to get some inspiration to continue with the study of evolutionary psychology. Simply put, genes do have “wants” and not all of them good.

P. 395 “A crime is a gamble whose payoff is immediate and whose possible cost comes later.  They attributed the discounting to low intelligence. …In the American inner cities, life expectancy for young males is low, and they know it.” 

I think you can start to see criminal events not as irrational, but much economically planned-out rational decisions.  This type of research is just waiting for a good economist with an evolutionary back ground to figure out the different situational graphs that happen with crimes, and how to stop them.

P. 446 “ Daddy’s interest in Mommy takes her attention away from me- and, even worse, threatens to create a baby brother or sister.”

Parental conflict with their kids and sibling conflict can be explained quite well with evolutionary psychology.  Humans like their own genes the best.  That sentence might seem a little basic, but it's an important idea to keep in mind.  Further on in the book Pinker dissolves Freud's Oedipal complex theory really well with the same type of reasoning. !

P. 491 “Texas as recently as 1974, a man who discovered his wife in flagrante delicto and killed her lover was not guilty of a crime.”

Wow!  This example brings to light  how humans think about genes; they want theirs to be passed on, “murder” be darned!

P. 555 “The Bible contains instructions for genocide, rape, and the destruction of families, and even the Ten Commandments, read in context, prohibit murder, lying, and theft only within the tribe, not against outsiders.” 

Steven Pinker talks about his negative feelings for the Bible. The part about the Ten Commandments I found interesting and also fitting within an evolutionary viewpoint.

P. 554-555. “How does religion fit into a mind that one might have thought was designed to reject the palpably not true?  …A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.”

I'm not so sure about this quote's idea.  It'll update this page when I can divulge more on this.  But he does have an interesting point regarding how we only sometimes strive for the truth.

          Whenever I’ve wanted an interesting idea to brood over, I’ve opened up the book to some random page and before long my brain is buzzing with thoughts and ideas.  I hope the same happens if you read it.

 “The Blank Slate”

This is another fun and insightful book from Steven Pinker.  Within it, you’ll find him debunking three major points.  For one, humans are not born a blank slate a.k.a “tabula rasa.”  Meaning we are genetically predisposed to do certain things.  Second, there was never an age of Rousseau-esqe golden antiquity where humans were “noble savages” living in harmony with each other and the environment.  The last premise he debunks is the idea that humans have souls.  He thinks there is “no ghost in the machine.”  Because Steven Pinker is the author, the book is a lot of fun to read. The book makes you feel rather cerebral because he explains the concepts so well they’re easy to comprehend.  This is always a plus when learning about daunting ideas like those in the book.

NPR has a prerecorded piece on him talking about this book.

As a side note, this website shown below will supposedly buy your soul from you.  Of course, only after a questionnaire that figures out how much your soul is worth. 

P.97 “Anyone who has watched the Discovery Channel has seen footage of baby wildebeests or zebras falling out of the birth control, wobbling on shaky legs for a minute or two, and then prancing around their mothers with their sense, drives, and motor control fully operational.  It happens far too quickly for patterned experience to have organized their brains, so there must be genetic mechanisms capable of shaping the brain before birth.”

This is a great example of how animals are born with genetic machinery, so why not the human animal?

P.115-119 Ok, so I know some of you think academics and evolutionary psychology is pretty dry boring stuff.  Read about the soap opera like antics on pages 115-119 and you’ll change your mind.  People accusing other people of genocide, people calling people racists and murderers.  Of course, this type of science does talk about these issues.  At times, people think if you talk about such things, then you must consequently believe it’s the correct way.  Here’s an example…

P.116 “The accusations against Chagnon were just as lurid.  In hisbooks and papers on the Yanomamö, Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in a killing had more wives and offspring than those who did not. (The finding is provocative because if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in which humans involved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected over evolutionary time.)”

As you can see, the evolutionary psychology does deal with sensitive issues.  Yet, it also presents a new paradigm for explaining these issues.  In this instance, Steven Pinker suggests violence might have helped in the past.  Accordingly, some people might have genes that are telling them to be violent.  For me, this is why area of research is is so interesting… It tries to answer very important questions and I think in many cases it presents a sound hypothesis.

 “The Language Instinct”

Sooo, I haven't read this book yet. Nevertheless, I do have an interesting insight.  If you look at the back of the book, there are write-ups about the book from different people.  One of them knocks the book's ideas really harshly, saying how it is wrong on several key points.  I thought it was really cool of Dr. Pinker to include not only positive reviews of his book.  Which brings to mind this quote: