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

as unimaginable as not knowing that the earth is round. Because of hindsight bias—the difficulty of recreating what it’s like to not know something you once didn’t know but do now—you may find it incredible that there was ever a time when you or others didn’t have command of Darwin’s concept. 6 , 7
    The elegance of Darwin’s idea is the way the story plays out, coupled with the fact that it relies on a small set of functional mechanisms and assumptions. Those functional mechanisms are three in number. They can be rattled off easily:
replication, variation
, and
selection
. The assumptions that go along with the mechanisms are
sex, death
, and
finite resources
.
    Before I describe how these functional mechanisms and assumptions play out to yield the panoply of species, I should explain why I have begun this chapter by intoning God and why, for that matter, this chapter has the title it does:
Darwin and the Boss
. The main reason is that there is an analogy behind what I have written here and what I plan to write about later: Natural selection is to God what the jungle principle is to the mental executive. Let me explain.
    The functional mechanisms and background assumptions that Darwin offered are sufficient to explain the origin of species. Saying this another way, you don’t need to invoke a divine guiding figure who designs, creates, and kills off species to explain how species originate within the Darwinian system. By the same token, you don’t need a central executive to explain how thoughts arise or die, how behaviors are chosen or suppressed, or how motives arise and subside. What I mean is that Darwin’s suggestion for the origin of species applies to the origin of mental events and the behaviors they allow. Darwin’s attempt to supplant a theistic account of the origin of the species with a self-organizing account inspires the attempt to supplant an executive-laden theory of mental phenomena with an account that eschews a mental overseer. This is not to deny that some mental processes can be called “executive processes.” That term is used by cognitive psychologists today to refer to volition. But saying that the mind as a whole acts as if someone inside directs traffic needn’t imply that there really is such an inner director.
    To understand this more fully, consider the following question: How do the mechanisms and assumptions of Darwin’s theory of natural selection lead to the diversity of life forms we see? In particular, how can the observeddiversity of life forms be explained without appealing to a divine being who runs the show?
    A way to answer this question is to consider an imaginary world that has just one animal and just one plant. Fortunately for the plant, the animal exhales carbon dioxide. Fortunately for the animal, the plant exhales oxygen. Also, luckily for the plant, the animal poops near the plant, so the plant, through its roots, ingests essential nutrients. And happily for the animal, the plant has lots of yummy leaves that the animal likes to eat.
    At first, this looks like a happy scenario. The plant and animal could go on like this for a long time—forever, perhaps, in a happily-ever-after scenario. But as in fairy tales, where the characters are supposed to live on forever but you know that’s impossible, the happily-ever-after ending for the cohabiting plant and animal is also unlikely to last long. If a strong wind comes along and blows the plant’s leaves off its branches, that’s it for the plant and for the animal too. If the animal gets stuck under a rock or freezes or drowns, that’s curtains for the animal and its leafy friend. The story ends all too suddenly. Life ceases to exist if either of these two living things perishes.
    To keep things going, what’s needed is multiplicity. Many plants and animals must be on the scene. That way, nature avoids putting all her eggs in one basket. With many animals, if one of them happens to get pinned beneath a rock