690) At the level of the whole brain, the remark that there has been selection for bigger brains is, to be sure, common in writings about human evolution [...] But if you think about it for a minute, you should quickly see that the premise has it backwards. Why would evolution ever have selected for sheer bigness of brain, that bulbous, metabolically greedy organ? A large-brained creature is sentenced to a life that combines all the disadvantages for balancing a watermelon on a broomstick, running in place in a down jacket, and, for women, passing a large kidney stone every few years. Any election on brain size itself would surely have favored the pinhead. Selection for more powerful computational abilities (language, perception, reasoning, and so on) must have given us a big brain as a by-product, not the other way around!

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

691) [Critic John] Simon has [...] discovered the trick used with great effectiveness by certain comedians, talk-show hosts, and punk-rock musicians; people of modest talent can attract the attention of the media, at least for a while, by being unrelentingly offensive.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

692) So what are the modules of the human mind? [...] Being a bit foolhardy myself, I will venture a guess as to [what they are] [...] aside from language and perception [...]

1. Intuitive mechanics: knowledge of the motions, forces, and deformations that objects undergo.


2. Intuitive [or "folk"] biology: understanding of how plants and animals work.


3. Number.


4. Mental maps for large territories.


5. Habitat selection: seeking of safe, information-rich, productive environments, generally savannah-like.


6. Danger, including the emotions of fear and caution, phobias for stimuli such as heights, confinement, risky social encounters, and venomous and predatory animals, and a motive to learn the circumstances in which each is harmless.


7. Food: what is good to eat.


8. Contamination, including the emotion of disgust, reactions to certain things that seem inherently disgusting, and intuitions about contagion and disease.


9. Monitoring of current well-being, including emotions of happiness and sadness, and moods on contentment and restlessness.


10. Intuitive psychology: predicting other people's behavior from their beliefs and desires.


11. A mental Rolodex: a database of individuals, with blanks for kinship, status or rank, history of exchanges favors, and inherent skills and strengths, plus criteria that evaluate each trait.


12. Self-concept: gathering and organizing information about one's value to other people, and packaging it for others.


13. Justice: sense of rights, obligations, and deserts, including the emotions of anger and revenge.


14. Kinship, including nepotism and allocations of parenting effort.


15. Mating, including feelings of sexual attraction, love, and intentions of fidelity and desertion.

To see how far standard psychology is from this conception, just turn to the table of contents of any textbook. The chapters will be: Physiological, Learning, Memory, Attention, Thinking, Decision-Making, Intelligence, Motivation, Emotion, Social, Development, Personality, Abnormal. I believe that with the exception of Perception and, of course, Language, not a single curriculum unit in psychology corresponds to a cohesive chunk of the mind. Perhaps this explains the syllabus-shock experiences by Introductory Psychology students. It is like explaining how a car works by first discussing the steel parts, then the aluminum parts, then the red parts, and so on, instead of the electrical system, the transmission, the fuel system, and so on. (Interestingly, textbooks on the brain are more likely to be organized around what I think of as real modules. Mental maps, fear, rage, feeding, maternal behavior, language, and sex are all common sections in neuroscience texts.)

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

693) There is no English Language Academy, and this is just as well; the purpose of the Academie Francaise is to amuse journalists from other countries with bitterly argued decisions that the French gaily ignore.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

694) Imagine you are watching a nature documentary. The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees' nests are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Your reaction would probably be, What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an "error"? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing? Who is this announcer anyway?

But for human language, most people think that the same pronouncements not only are meaningful but cause for alarm. Johnny can't construct a grammatical sentence. As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functional illiterates [...] English itself will steadily decline unless be get back to basics and start to respect language again.

To a linguist or psycholinguist, of course, language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people who speak the language and ask them.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 686 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.