"Mind Design"

The last chapter of Steven Pinker's "valuable" book; deals with how some of the major social sciences have based their recent theories on what Pinker has introduced as the brain's ability to produce language through an innate "mind design".

Margaret Mead, anthropologist and John Watson, psychologist are the two founders of the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) which asserts that the human nature is changeable to different personalities through social upbringing. Pinker in fact sets forth a more coherent version of such model suggesting that at the beginning heredity builds an "innate psychological mechanisms" such as "learning mechanisms". Meanwhile the "environment" provides input for this hereditary innate system. The interface between the environment and these innate mechanisms results in the human behavior. It also helps humans develop skills and values and access the knowledge.

A recent alternative to SSSM is the "Integrated Causal Model" in which some psychologists or anthropologists embark on the evolution theory to form their own science-related hypothesis. For example, Tooby and Cosmides pioneered the "psychological foundations of culture". This "evolutionary psychology" announces the emergence of brain as a result of evolution. The brain in turn produces the psychological processes such as knowing and learning. These two developments in the human psyche lead to the acquisition of "values and knowledge" which make up a person's culture.

Computational linguists like Ray Jackendoff have used this substitute model to enhance this part of the language science.

Pinker believes that the "evolutional psychology" takes its lessons from human language. The psychology that is based on the evolution considers the existence of mental softwares for reasoning and perception and supposes that some "innate mechanism" involves that makes the learning happen when it works at cross-purposes through different modules each with provisions to learn in its own way. Like the languages, these mental mechanisms in turn have evolved from the "natural selection"; but not all aspects of mind are adaptations. The mind's adaptations are not necessarily beneficial in the evolutionary novel environments like the twenthieth-century cities.

Just like how the languages have spread among humans through the years; particular kinds of learning have contagiously spread in a community and the minds of people have become coordinated into shared patterns to form a certain culture.

Meta Culture is a Universal Pattern shared by all human beings. An example of an innate module is "folk biology" in which humans are believed to be born with basic intuitions about plants and animals. According to this module, stone-age people were both botanists and zoologists who had special instincts about living things that began early in life.

The question is how the difference in the biochemistry of people helps the natural selection and consequently the evolution?