Author Pinker explores 'Mind'

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and Director at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. He is well-known for his best-selling "The Language Instinct," where his unconventional take on language has earned him the title of "Language's Bad Boy."

PREVIEW
	Steven Pinker Tonight at 7:30 Borders Books & Music Free

Tonight, he will be reading from his new book, "How the Mind Works," which is 550-plus pages of why we humans think and act the way we do. Sexuality, incest, violence, family relation and the five senses are all theorized under the machination of the computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology.

"The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people," writes Pinker.

Gotcha. This is a book that's supposed to be written for non-science folk, but at times his prose tries too hard to be upbeat. In the case of "modules," it is still unclear as to exactly what he means by mental organs that each have a "specialized d

Cognitive psychologist and author Steven Pinker.

esign that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world," because he never physically nails down what a module is.

Instead, he explains it as a concept: "A mental module probably looks more like roadkill, sprawling messily over the bulges and crevices of the brain." At a certain point, the mechanical/structural meaning to his words lost me in his prose.

One of his main postulates is the universal structure to human thought. By comparing human reasoning, which is multi-leveled to binary computers, the complexity of the simplest action, like holding a pencil, is illustrated. "People in all cultures carry out long chains of reasoning built from links whose truth they could not have observed directly."

In other words, to a certain extent, we share the same hard drive and parse information similarly. There is a universality here that is comforting.

But, the demarcation between the sexes is fairly universal.

Through "reverse engineering," Pinker dissects human behavior today and tries to figure out how the human mind evolved to fit its environment. And our foraging past's remnants still affect human behavior and biology today.

Using Pinker's guidelines, let's say that men have smaller testicles for their body size than chimpanzees but bigger ones than gorillas and gibbons. According to Pinker, testicle size has become a measure of monogamy, because chimpanzees are notoriously promiscuous and gorillas are not. This suggests that human ancestral females have not been entirely monogamous.

All right, so how do these testicles affect our behavior? Well, a man that is jealous of his woman's sexual activities is more likely to pass on his own genes. To a certain extent, this makes sense.

"The largest cause of spousal abuse and spousal jealousy, almost always the man's." Why, if a man wants to pass on his genes, would killing the woman be an act of genetic preservation? There's a chance that the offspring might be his, too.

Pinker makes a weak refutation of the "common feminist theory" that men are brainwashed by media images that glorify violence against women.

"In our society, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks, and the best predictor of a woman's looks is her husband's wealth." This isn't completely a heterosexual world, and nor is it necessary that a woman is dependent on her husband for wealth.

Pinker gives an entertaining argument for a mind that has evolved to create a framework of our world. However, personal experience seems integral to the formation of an individual. Although "How the Mind Works"has its problems, an evening with Steven Pinker promises to be interesting nonetheless.

10-24-97