After a discussion (almost a year ago?) on Reddit, one of the commentators recommended that I read Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”. I ordered the book, and it arrived shortly afterwards, but I only started going through it recently. It’s a pretty hefty book, at just under 570 pages excluding the index and bibliography and all that stuff, but the rate at which I’m seeing new (to me, at least) insights is pretty impressive. I’m only 10% of the way through it, and I’ve already had my mind blown twice.

A blog post that contains nothing but a quote is content-free enough that normally I would relegate it to Twitter, but unfortunately, these quotes exceed 140 characters, and I had difficulties and reticence in trying to paraphrase them to fit. I also don’t think I could contribute much commentary on the quote, besides gushing agreement, so these next few posts may very well be nothing more than quotes of passages from the book. I hope this does not offend.

[N]atural selection is not a puppetmaster that pulls the strings of behavior directly. It acts by designing the generator of behavior: The package of information-processing and goal-pursuing mechanisms called the mind. Our minds are designed to generate behavior that would have been adaptive, on average, in our ancestral environment, but any particular deed done today is the effect of dozens of causes. Behavior is the outcome of an internal struggle among many mental modules, and it is played out on the chessboard of opportunities and constraints defined by other people’s behaviour. A recent cover story in Time asked, “Adultery: Is It in Our Genes?” The question makes no sense because neither adultery nor any other behavior can be in our genes. Conceivably a desire for adultery can be an indirect product of our genes, but the desire may be overridden by other desires that are also indirect products of our genes, such as the desire to have a trusting spouse. And the desire, even if it prevails in the rough-and-tumble of the mind, cannot be consummated as overt behavior unless there is a partner around in whom that desire has also prevailed. Behavior itself did not evolve; what evolved was the mind.

[…] Automobiles have a component, the carburetor, that is designed to mix air and gasoline, and mixing air and gasoline is a subgoal of the ultimate goal, carting people around. Though the process of natural selection itself has no goal, it evolved entities that (like the automobile) are highly organized to bring about certain goals and subgoals. […] Was the human mind ultimately designed to create beauty? To discover truth? To love and to work? To harmonize with other human beings and with nature?

The logic of natural selection gives the answer. The ultimate goal that the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes that created it. […] [Natural selection] predicts only that replicators whose effect tend to enhance the probability of their own replication come to predominate. When we ask questions like “Who or what is supposed to benefit from an adaptation?” and “What is a design in living things a design for?” the theory of natural selection provides the answer the long-term stable replicators, genes. Even our bodies, our selves, are not the ultimate beneficiary of our design. As Gould has said, “What is the ‘individual reproductive success’ of which Darwin speaks? It cannot be the passage of one’s body into the next generation&emdash;for, truly, you can’t take it with you in this sense above all!” The criterion by which genes get selected is the quality of the bodies they build, but it is the genes making it into the next generation, not the perishable bodies, that are selected to live and fight another day.

Though there are some holdouts (such as Gould himself), the gene’s-eye view predominates in evolutionary biology and has been a stunning success. It has asked, and is finding the answers to, the deepest questions about life, such as how life arose, why there are cells, why there are bodies, why there is sex, how the genome is structured, why animals interact socially, and why there is communication. […]

But almost everyone misunderstands the theory. Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. […] Dawkins explained the theory in a book called The Selfish Gene, and the metaphor was chosen carefully. People don’t selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved. Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends.

The confusion between our goals and our genes’ goals has spawned one muddle after another. A reviewer of a book about the volution of sexuality protests that human adultery, unlike the animal equivalent, cannot be a strategy to spread the genes because adulterers take steps to prevent pregnancy. But whose strategy are we talking about? Sexual desire is not people’s strategy to propagate their genes. It’s people’s strategy to attain the pleasures of sex, and the pleasures of sex are the genes’ strategy to propagate themselves. If the genes don’t get propagated, it’s because we are smarter than they are. A book on the emotional life of animals complains that if altruism according to biologists is just helping kin or exchanging favors, both of which serve the interests of one’s genes, it would really be altruism after all, but some kind of hypocrisy. This too is a mixup. Just as blueprints don’t necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don’t necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is to build a selfless brain.