How the Mind Works"A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear." —New York Review of Books In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life. This edition of Pinker's bold and buoyant classic is updated with a new foreword by the author. |
From inside the book
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... cultures can vary arbitrarily and without limit, surveys of the ethnographic literature show that the peoples of the ... culture) is literally wrong. Rather, it falls into the category of ideas that are so bad they are not even wrong ...
... culture and learning. But learning is not a surrounding gas or force field, and it does not happen by magic. It is made possible by innate machinery designed to do the learning. The claim that there are several innate modules is a claim ...
... cultures; (8) women with more severe pregnancy sickness are less likely to miscarry; (9) women with more severe pregnancy sickness are less likely to bear babies with birth defects. The fit between how a baby-making system in a natural ...
... , which Tooby and Cosmides have dubbed the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). The SSSM proposes a fundamental division between biology and culture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives 44 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... Culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society. Even the reformers of the SSSM have accepted its framing ...