Word: pinkering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book, immodestly titled How the Mind Works (Norton; $29.95), Pinker suggests an intriguing if highly controversial answer. The mind, he says, is like an ancient, jerry-built computer program made up of dozens of specialized "modules," each honed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution. There are modules for stereo vision and manual dexterity, for understanding numbers and grammatical speech, for sexual jealousy and romantic love. Don't think of them as "detachable, snap-in components," he cautions. They're not visible to the naked eye "like the rump steak on the supermarket cow display...
...Mind Works offers a smooth and surprisingly pleasant ride over some pretty rugged intellectual terrain, it is because Pinker writes in the same breezy style that brightens his classroom lectures. He likes to quote Mae West ("Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself") and Woody Allen ("I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics"), along with linguist Noam Chomsky, artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky and, of course, Charles Darwin. Pinker has a showman's sense for knowing "when to hold his reader's attention with an illustration or a joke," observed...
...Mind Works is stirring up an academic hornet's nest. The ideas that anchor Pinker's book--an artful blend of artificial intelligence and evolutionary psychology--strike many experts as glibly superficial. To Pinker's credit, he has worked hard to make explicit the sometimes tenuous connection between robots, computers and the evolution of the human psyche. Without the models developed by computer scientists, Pinker baldly states at one point, "it would be impossible to make sense of the evolution of the mind...
Sweeping pronouncements like that will strike many scientists who study the brain as puzzling, if not downright ludicrous. Neurobiologists, in particular, will find much to quibble with in How the Mind Works--which is not surprising, since Pinker comes at the subject from an entirely different perspective. The son of a traveling salesman, Pinker grew up in Montreal and attended McGill University, where he became fascinated with the psychology of perception and cognition. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard, then moved a few blocks down Massachusetts Avenue to M.I.T., linguist Chomsky's home base. Chomsky's seminal theory--that humans...
...call Pinker opinionated is an understatement. He declares, among other things, that there is no such thing as general intelligence. He dismisses as "neurobabble" the current fashion of dressing up fuzzy ideas about child rearing--like reading to babies--as somehow good for the developing brain. And he accuses intellectuals of pretending that evolution has nothing to do with "the fantastically complex design" of the human mind...