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T A B L E__T A L K

Does spelling matter in cyberspace? Come to Table Talk's Digital Cul ture area and add your voice.

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R E C E N T L Y

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

License to code
By Greg Lindsay
Universities experiment with ways to cash in on software research
(12/12/97)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
Drudge falls for Yahoo hackers' nonsense
(12/11/97)

The girl-game jinx
By Elizabeth Weil
Can selling computer games to girls be reduced to a science?
(12/10/97)

E.D., phone home!
By Scott Rosenberg
Esther Dyson talks about Microsoft, the Net, Russia and more
(12/09/97)

Technocracy in America
By Andrew Leonard
A review of "Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century" by G. Pascal Zachary
(12/08/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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Arguments like these make evolutionary psychology the natural enemy of cultural relativism, and Pinker launches into this fray with gusto. He never passes up an opportunity to lob a bomb at the culture-is-everything schools of feminism, sociology and anthropology (the last described in "The Language Instinct" as comprising "complete and total gulls"). But the straw man is Pinker's favorite opponent: He never fails to overstate a dissenting position before denouncing it as "patently senseless" or "spectacularly wrong."

Pinker's sweeping survey of the mind encompasses not just gender distinctions but the neural machinery responsible for sight, intelligence, emotionality and relationships. He is at his best discussing the mental mechanisms that construct color vision or depth perception or the ability to make sense of shapes. Erudite and witty, he keeps up a narrative flow through highly technical material. His references to familiar pop-cultural landmarks are nonstop -- from "The Terminator" to "Winnie the Pooh." His quick analogies and chatty style ground readers in a familiar world, even while they are led into arcane scientific realms. Evolutionary theory, the ins and outs of natural selection and artificial intelligence are fitting components to his thesis that the mind is an elaborate neural computer. His summaries of these topics are some of the best anywhere.

Pinker's enthusiasm runs so high, however, that the latter portion of his book does much to discredit the doctrine of evolutionary psychology. Within this realm, everything mental is a strategy to obtain some measurable survival benefit -- and Pinker propels the viewpoint to absurdity.

His explication of an infant's cry is a telling case. A baby should be motivated to cry, he reasons, in order to extract more care than a parent is willing to give. "Since parents can learn to ignore cries of wolf," he goes on to muse, "the [baby's] tactics have to be more insidious." An infant convinced of its own need could emit a more persuasive cry than one who knows he is lying. After chasing his own tail, Pinker decides that the most successful infant will be one innately deluded about the validity of his need for parents. "Self-deception may begin early," he warns. It's like reading Oliver Stone's version of "Dr. Spock's Baby Care": Love is out, paranoia in.

Peculiar, alienated concoctions like these arise not just from evolutionary psychology, but from Pinker's desire to stamp out what he thinks are outdated Romantic notions like mother-infant bonding and passionate love. Pinker tells readers, for instance, that a mother's initial attitude toward a newborn baby is "a cool assessment." After a week comes "appreciation," and a mother warms up to love only if she judges her baby healthy enough to survive.

Evolutionary psychology would find it convenient if mothers behaved this way, because the theory holds that a mother should not deposit her emotional investment in a baby until she is assured of its viability -- only then should she feel the motivation to care for him. Unfortunately for the theory, live human mothers don't act or feel this way. As anyone who has witnessed a birth or even spoken to a new mother can tell you, "cool assessment" is typically about as far from her emotional state as one can get. Pinker amplified his position in a recent New York Times Magazine essay on mothers who murder their newborns. To Pinker, such an act bespeaks neither psychopathology nor criminality -- it's a woman exercising her Darwinian sense. (Family environment suboptimal for raising a child to maturity? Ditch the kid in a dumpster and try again later.)

The baby isn't all that gets thrown out with the bath water in the reductive anti-Romanticism of "How the Mind Works." In the last chapter, immodestly titled "The Meaning of Life," Pinker tackles assigning a Darwinian purpose to human urges he terms "biologically frivolous": the drive to create art and literature, the capacity to enjoy music, the ability to laugh and the aspiration toward spirituality. In Pinker's eyes, activities that do not advance survival have no intrinsic value. "The very uselessness of art that makes it so incomprehensible to evolutionary biology, makes it all too comprehensible to economics and social psychology," he writes. "What better proof that you have money to spare than your being able to spend it on doodads and stunts that don't fill the belly or keep the rain out?"

In other words, art is a trinket whose true function is to bestow an imprimatur of reproductive fitness on those successful enough to have time to waste on it. The content of art? No such thing. A work of art, he says, "having no practical function, does not have to meet any demanding mechanical specifications. A scene has to be painted with brushstrokes; why not use jarring swirls to enhance the impact of a starry night?" So much for Van Gogh. Music, humor, literature and spirituality emerge in similarly bland and tiny pieces after being fed through the Cuisinart of Pinker's applied evolutionary psychology.

This finale provides a lesson on when to quit while you're ahead. Pinker's ultimate propositions about human nature are so narrow that readers are bound to question the validity of his earlier and more plausible claims. Some aspects of human nature -- most of our emotional lives, for instance -- cannot be whittled down to genetic stratagems without sacrificing their meaning. It's the unusual author who concludes by arguing that creative human productions, like his own book, are useless baubles whose content is irrelevant. This is one evolutionary argument that Pinker, should he desire to prosper as an author, might not wish to win.
SALON | Dec. 15, 1997