It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

to which we humans belong,
homo sapiens
, otherwise known as “knowing man.”
    You probably know the core of Darwin’s theory, but I’ll review it here to set the stage for what’s to come. I won’t go into details about evolutionary biology. My aim will simply be to lay out Darwin’s theory as a general model for the kind of cognitive theory I wish to propose for mental function.
Darwin and the Deity
    Charles Darwin was born in 1809 into an affluent British family. His grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, a well-known thinker and physician in his day. 2
    Charles didn’t have to work for a living. Blessed as he was with the freedom to contemplate nature without having to sweep chimneys or swab floors, he could ponder at leisure the diverse forms of life he observed as he ambled through the countryside and wandered on the shore. His most famous ambling occurred on the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, which he visited on a voyage around the world aboard a boat called, aptly enough, the
Beagle
. 3
    As a child, Darwin learned that God created the heavens and the earth. Darwin learned as well that soon after God created the heavens and the earth, God created all of the earth’s plants and animals. Finally, young Darwinlearned that God created Adam and, from Adam’s rib, God created Eve. God did all this in just a few days, after which God took a one-day sabbatical and then returned to work, doing God-knows-what ever since. 4
    Darwin would later question the authenticity of the Bible’s Creation story. Doing so took courage, for God is all-mighty. Among God’s abilities are making the sun and stars, parting the seas, forming mountains, and knowing everything that can possibly be known, even while giving people the freedom to think for themselves.
    Charles Darwin was raised in a politically progressive Christian (Unitarian) family. The book in which he proposed his radical idea is one of the most famous books in the history of science,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
. 5
    Darwin was vilified for his radical proposal. For example, in a cartoon that appeared in his lifetime, his head was drawn atop a chimpanzee’s body. But as so often happens when an author’s work stirs debate, the arguments about
Origins
drew a great deal of attention to the work being criticized and helped make the book a bestseller.
    Darwin’s fame lived after him. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a place where monarchs, great poets, and other famous scientists were interred. Darwin was buried there because, despite the controversy around his work, he was recognized as a truly important thinker, one whose idea could hardly be ignored. Over time, Darwin came to be hailed as one of the most important thinkers in the history of Western civilization—along with such luminaries as Newton (a fellow interree at Westminster Abbey), Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud (none of whom lies there). The book you’re now reading is just one of many that have applied Darwin’s thinking to a domain beyond which Darwin originally intended. High tribute, indeed, to his idea!
Darwin’s Idea
    What was Darwin’s idea? It was that the species of the earth can be traced to a single, original species and that all the species that have ever been here got here, stayed here, or died off through a process called natural selection.
    Natural selection is a simple process. The way it works can be summarized in one sentence:
Species that produce offspring tend to survive
. It doesn’t hurt to state that principle another way as well:
Species that don’t produce offspring tend not to survive
.
    “Wait a minute!” you might exclaim. “That can’t be the whole story! I could have thought of that myself!”Perhaps, but the idea has so suffused our culture that it’s hard to imagine not knowing it, at least if you’re the kind of person who reads books like this one. Being ignorant of Darwin’s idea of natural selection is nearly