How The Mind Works

Steven Pinker

• There is nothing particularly healthy about natural foods. Your cabbage, a Darwinian creature, has no more desire to be eaten than you do, and since it can't very well defend itself through behavior, it resorts to chemical warfare. Most plants have evolved dozens of toxins in their tissues: insecticides, insect repellents, irritants, paralytics, poisons, and other sand to throw in herbivores' gears. Herbivores have in turn evolved countermeasures, such as a liver to detoxify the poisons and the taste sensation we call bitterness to deter any further desire to ingest them.

• At every moment we choose, consciously or unconsciously, between good things now and better things later.

• Status symbols are flaunted and coveted not necessarily because they are useful or attractive but often because they are so rare, wasteful, or point less that only the wealthy can afford them. The logic is. You can't see all m wealth and earning power (my bank account, my lands, all my allies and flunkeys), but you can see my gold bathroom fixtures. No one could afford them without wealth to spare, therefore you know I am wealthy

• If the brain has not changed over the centuries, how can the human condition have improved? Part of the answer, I think, is that literacy knowledge, and the exchange of ideas have undermined some kinds of exploitation. It's not that people have a well of goodness that moral exhortations can tap. It's that information can be framed in a way that makes exploiters look like hypocrites or fools.

• Tit-for-tat does not cement a friendship, it strains it. Nothing can be more awkward for good friends than business transaction between them, like the sale of a car. The same is true for one's best friend in life, a spouse. The couples who keep close track of what each has done for the other are the couples who are the least happy.

• Wouldn't it be better for everyone if we were built to enjoy what was best for the group? Companies wouldn't pollute, public service unions wouldn't strike, citizens would recycle bottles and take the bus, and those teenagers would stop ruining a quiet Sunday after-noon with their jet-skis.

  Perhaps we should rejoice that people's emotions aren't designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one's group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That's why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group's, the outcomes are some of history's worst atrocities.

• Since hypocrisy is easiest to expose when people compare notes, the search for trustworthiness makes us avid consumers of gossip. In turn, our reputation becomes our most valuable possession, and we are motivated to protect (and inflate) it with conspicuous displays of generosity, sympathy, and integrity and to take umbrage when it is impugned.

• Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us. We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs, not of snakes and spiders. Public safety officials try to strike fear in the hearts of citizens using everything from statistics to shocking photographs, usually to no avail. Parents scream and punish to deter their children from playing with matches or chasing a ball into the street, but when Chicago schoolchildren were asked what they were most afraid of, they cited lions, tigers, and snakes, unlikely hazards in the Windy City

• Why would the vision thing make such a difference? Depth perception defines a three-dimensional space filled with movable solid objects. Color makes objects pop out from their backgrounds, and gives us a sensation that corresponds to the stuff an object is made of, distinct from our perception of the shape of the stuff. Together they have pushed the primate brain into splitting the flow of visual information into two streams: a "what" system, for objects and their shapes and compositions, and a "where" system, for their locations and motions. It can't be a coincidence that the human mind grasps the world even the most abstract, ethereal concepts as a space filled with movable things and stuff

• Language is a means of exchanging knowledge. It multiplies the benefit of knowledge, which can not only be used but exchanged for other resources, and lowers its cost, because knowledge can be acquired from the hard-won wisdom, strokes of genius, and trial and error of others rather than only from risky exploration and experimentation. Infor mation can be shared at a negligible cost: if I give you a fish, I no longer possess the fish, but if I give you information on how to fish, I still possess the information myself. So an information-exploiting lifestyle goes well with living in groups and pooling expertise that is, with culture.

• Natural selection does not have the foresight of engineers, but that cuts both ways: it does not have their mental blocks, impoverished imagination, or conformity to to bourgeois sensibilities and ruling-class interests, either. Guided only by what works, selection can home in on brilliant, creative solutions.

• Life is a densely branching bush, not a scale or a ladder, and living organisms are at the tips of the branches, not on lower phanes dediyi rungs. Every organism alive today has had the same amount of time to evolve since the origin of life-the amoeba, the platypus, the rhesus macaque, and, yes, Larry on the answering machine asking for another date.

• No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn.