HOW STEVEN PINKER’S MIND WORKS

It is also, as most reviewers have noted, a model of science writing in the popular vein. It is scholarly, as Pinker brings together (what I assume to be) the latest findings in linguistics, cognitive psychology, paleontology, microbiology, anthropology, and other -ologies too numerous to mention. It is widely allusive; Pinker favors references to Woody Allen movies, Saturday Night Live, and rock lyrics, but he can pull out Shakespeare and John Donne when he has to. And it offers enough passages of lively prose to keep you reading through the inevitable rough-sledding of technical detail.

With the success of How the Mind Works — TV appearances, personality profiles in the slick magazines, and the rest — Pinker inherits the crown of the late king of pop-science writers, Carl Sagan. Pinker is a linguist and Sagan was an astronomer, but the popular work of both has the effect of getting the rest of us to, as it were, cut the crap — get a grip, face the facts, wake up and smell the coffee. Everyone, after all, has the experience of himself as an autonomous self — a soul, even — and most of us have the sense that human beings, as a group, occupy an exalted place in the world. A very large majority of people believe in a supernatural supreme being of one sort or another, and only slightly fewer, according to polls, believe that the materialistic processes of evolution were divinely inspired.

To Sagan these were mere conceits and delusions, and he dispatched them with a relish verging on the unseemly. His final bestseller was called Pale Blue Dot — the title itself a reminder that the Earth, rightly understood, is merely a “dim and tiny planet in an undistinguished sector of an obscure spiral arm” of the equally fourth-rate Milky Way. Sagan told his readers that the advance of science was a “series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance. . . .” Notions to the contrary — such as Kant’s commonsensical belief that “without man . . . the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have not a final end” — were “self-indulgent folly.” “A Principle of Mediocrity,” Sagan wrote, “seems to apply to all our circumstances.” (Stop the Pale Blue Dot, I want to get off.)

Pinker seems a friendlier fellow than Sagan, less austere, less inclined to scold, less given to intellectual browbeating; he offers materialism with a smile and loads of charm. He too assumes the inevitable scientific picture of the human being as a “hunk of matter,” a very lucky Meat Puppet with a weakness for self-delusion. But Pinker is just as likely to extol the splendor of the scientific view, the magnificence and stunning complexity of the natural world, and to remind us how glorious it is to live in an aimless, random, amoral universe. Sagan was moved to similar rhapsodies on occasion. All science writers have been so disposed since the time of Darwin. The grand old man, having buried forever any respectable belief in a Designer of the universe, closed The Origin of Species with one of the great whistling- past-the-graveyard perorations in English literature: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers,” etc. In other words: Buck up, boys. I can take it, and so can you.

Pinker is similar to Sagan in another respect: As Sagan did beginning in the early ’80s, with dire warnings about the arms race and rising defense budgets, Pinker is carefully insinuating himself into cultural matters, armed, as Sagan was, with the clerical status we confer on scientists nowadays. (The real clerics, of course, have given up clerical status.) In fact, the entire field of evolutionary psychology has begun to be embraced by an unlikely ally: political conservatives, now as ever on the prowl for some sanction for their beliefs about how the world works.

This is where Pinker’s treatment of infanticide comes in. But we should back up first, and explore this new science of evolutionary psychology and the professor’s effort to bring it to the masses.

“Evolutionary psychology,” Pinker writes, “is the attempt to understand our mental faculties in light of the evolutionary processes that shaped them.” This is a relatively recent job for evolutionists. For years Darwinians, while wildly ambitious elsewhere, steered clear of explaining matters of the spirit — love, sacrifice, art, altruism, religious yearning. In this they followed the master. In 1859 Darwin wrote, “I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, anymore than with life itself.” When it came to the human species, orthodox Darwinians contented themselves with explaining how natural selection accounts for the design of the eye, or the volutes of the ear. Evolution — or at least evolutionary explanations — stopped at the cranium.

Evolutionary psychologists disdain this sort of humility. The brain, they reason, is an organ showing complex design. Complex design is a result of natural selection. Therefore the brain must have evolved according to the same evolutionary process as did the eye or the ear. (It is one of the many curiosities of Darwinism that the more the world shows signs of design, the more it disproves a Designer of the world.) And so, notwithstanding Darwin’s own reticence, the “primary mental powers” are likewise deemed material artifacts, explainable by evolutionary theory. Unhappy skeptics see evolutionary psychology as the final triumph of Darwinian imperialism, overrunning the last redoubts of the spiritual life. With it, materialism can in theory explain life “all the way up and all the way down,” in the words of one proponent, from the behavior of cells to a mother’s love.

How the Mind Works is only the most recent attempt to popularize evolutionary psychology. It first leaked into the newsmagazines in the mid- 1970s, when E. O. Wilson, who studied bugs, introduced the discipline of ” sociobiology.” (Evolutionary psychology is an adaptation, so to speak, of sociobiology.) In 1994, the journalist Robert Wright brought the field up to date with Moral Animal, which became a bestseller. Wright’s book was overly glib, as journalistic accounts of science tend to be (ahem). Some critics of evolutionary psychology, notably the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, have dismissed Moral Animal as “egregiously simplistic” and in parts “absurd.” But Wright conveyed the gist of the enterprise, particularly its immodesty. For evolutionary psychology — like Skinnerian behaviorism before it, like Freudianism before that — is a unified-field theory of human behavior.

“If the theory of natural selection is correct,” Wright wrote, “then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these [Darwinian] terms. The basic ways we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each other, are with us today by virtue of their past contribution to genetic fitness.”

“Slowly but unmistakably, a new world view is emerging,” Wright went on. ” Once truly grasped . . . it can entirely alter one’s perception of social reality.”

Wright’s statement is even truer today. Evolutionary psychology is the hippest field in science. It has lately entered the popular press, in tarted- up form, through stories about the “gay gene,” the “fat gene,” “the happiness gene,” and so on. The field could have no better pamphleteer than Pinker, a 43-year-old “evolutionary pop star,” as Time called him, who favors European-cut suits and long curly hair; imagine Peter Frampton as an investment banker. Of course his pamphlet is huge — this is what makes it a science book — and its tone is unremittingly cheerful — this is what makes it a popular science book. But for all its lightheartedness, there is a distinct and inevitable element of party-poopery in his view of how the mind works.

Freud was a creature of the 19th century, and so he took for his model of the mind a highly pressurized pneumatic pump, channeling energy efficiently this way and that but ready to blow at any minute. B. F. Skinner, a mid- century man, saw it as a slightly more sophisticated machine, emitting outputs in direct relation to inputs. Pinker is of the ’90s. He sees the mind as a computer — or more precisely, a series of advanced computing modules, designed to perform certain tasks. Computers today are of course much more subtle and complicated machines than any that Skinner or Freud knew of; Pinker’s view of the mind is thus much more complicated than theirs as well.

The mind is a “package of information processing and goal pursuing mechanisms.” The package evolved (in what Pinker calls, unromantically, the ” primate assembly process”) to solve particular problems faced by our hunter- gatherer ancestors as they roamed the savanna millions of years ago. Depth perception allowed us to gauge accurately the threat posed by a nearby predator; sexual jealousy arose as a way of keeping mates and thus ensuring the protection of the young; our sense of disgust armed us against eating unsanitary food. Thanks to natural selection, these survival strategies are now genetically programmed — that is, we are “hard-wired,” to use the current cliche, by our genes to behave in certain ways.

Does this sound deterministic? Well, it is. But evolutionary psychologists are not simple determinists; they are complicated determinists. “For 99 percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands,” Pinker writes. “Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations.” Confronted with the new enticements of our new environment, human beings will make choices not explainable by direct reference to survival strategies. The modules may compete with each other, compute the relative merits of various opportunities and desires, and — ping! — turn out someone who chooses to be celibate (which, in evolutionary terms, is about as idiotic a choice as you can make).

This slight complication in the evolutionary scheme should not be interpreted as free will. Evolutionary psychology isn’t as crudely reductive as, say, behaviorism was, or early versions of sociobiology. But it’s still plenty reductive. Pinker’s point is that the mind is not an “emanation” of the brain, as some theorists have it, much less a “self” or a “ghost in the machine,” as most people seem to think. The mind is simply a function of the brain; it is what the brain does. And how the brain functions is determined by the genes. “The genes created us, body and mind,” Pinker says, quoting the biologist Richard Dawkins. It is axiomatic among Darwinians — you could call it an article of faith — that natural selection has no goal, no end toward which it works But, writes Pinker, “the ultimate goal the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes that created it.”

Dawkins coined the term “the selfish gene,” and the unsophisticated have taken it to mean that human beings are unremittingly selfish. This is a misapprehension. Pinker amplifies the point nicely. “People don’t selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves They do it by the way they build our brains . . . by making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children.” Sometimes building an unselfish Meat Puppet is the best way for the selfish gene to pass itself along. Genes are the new “ghost in the machine.”

And so, one by one, the remorseless logic of evolutionary psychology puts paid to our cherished delusions. I bet you thought you liked your kids. “We now understand why many animals, including humans, love their children, parents, grandparents,” Pinker writes. These individuals share the same genes, and the genes are manipulating the Meat Puppets to protect the genes. ” People helping relatives equals genes helping themselves.” When a mother, watching her son enter surgery, wishes she could take his place, “it is not the species or the group or her body that wants her to have that most unselfish emotion,” Pinker writes. Much less is it she herself, or the love that consumes her. “It is her selfish genes.”

Pinker says this is a “more hopeful way” of envisioning human motivation. But it’s hard to see how. The conscience, for example, is for many people the most important faculty of the mind, suggesting an objective and universal moral order to which human beings are somehow fled. In his 660-page book, Pinker dispatches it in a single paragraph.

“H. L. Mencken defined conscience as ‘the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking.’ . . . People feel guilty about private transgressions because they may become public; confessing a sin before it is discovered is evidence of sincerity and gives the victim better grounds to maintain the relationship. Shame . . . evokes a public display of contrition, no doubt for the same reason.”

Note the “no doubt.” It is the purest Pinker. How about the mystery of romantic love? Surely here is something insusceptible to rational explication. After all, the woman you fall in love with, if you’re a man, is almost certainly not the prettiest Meat Puppet on the planet, or the richest, or the healthiest — not, in other words, the optimal genetic choice. (That would be Michelle Pfeiffer.) But according to Pinker, the irrationality of your choice is precisely why it is so, um, rational, as an evolutionary matter.

If your choice were purely rational, he explains, “then the object of your desire could predict that, by the law of averages, someone better would come around sooner or later, and that you would dump them like a hot potato. But if it’s clear that your choice is partly involuntary, partly directed to that unique individual, as opposed to that individual’s list of qualities, that gives your partner some assurance that you are committed.”

No doubt!

And so on, and so on. How to explain grief, in evolutionary terms? It is ” useful only as a deterrent”: Take care of your gene-containing kids, because if something happens to them and, God forbid, their genes (which are yours, too), then you’ll feel awful. Music? Bach thought he was writing the B Minor Mass to the glory of God. “I suspect music is auditory cheesecake,” Pinker says, “an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties,” including habitat selection and auditory scene analysis. Bach was an ass.

As you read How the Mind Works, the reductionism washes over you until . . . suddenly . . . unexpectedly . . . you notice something. We are getting further and further away from the stuff of science — which is to say, from observable fact and testable theory. Different readers will notice this at different points in the book. For me, it came in Pinker’s explanation of our sense of natural beauty. Why do we human beings find particular landscapes pleasing?

Since most of human evolution took place in the African savanna, it is to be expected, from an evolutionary-psychological perspective, that human beings prefer savannas to other environments. And sure enough, says Pinker, they do. A savanna, as you recall from your National Geographic TV specials, is a sweeping grassland relieved here and there by an oasis of trees and shade. We like it because it offers views to the horizon, which allowed our ancestors to spy predators and sources of food, and because it has few impediments to movement and retreat, which allowed Grandma and Grandpa to get the hell out when danger arose.

“In experiments on human habitat preference . . . children prefer savannas, even though they have never been to one.” In doing so, suggests Pinker, “they are revealing our species’ default habitat preference.”

Why of course. Very reasonable. Until, reading along, you realize . . . but . . . this isn’t true. Pinker offers no citation for these habitat experiments, so we can’t double-check the results. But most kids I know prefer the beach, and the adults I know seem about evenly divided among the beach, the mountains, and woodland retreats. Forgive the anecdotal observation: I don’t know anybody who wants a two-week vacation in the savanna, except for a few oddballs seduced by their Banana Republic catalogues.

But Pinker throttles onward. Two other researchers, whose work he does cite, “found another key to natural beauty, which they call mystery. Paths bending around hills, meandering streams . . . and partially blocked views grab our interest by hinting that the land may have important features that could be discovered by further exploration.”

So here we are: If you prefer savannas, and everyone does, it’s because our ancestors wanted wide open spaces to view approaching predators. If you like rolling hillsides, it’s because they offered our ancestors the tantalizing possibility of greater rewards, even though, presumably, rolling hillsides would work to the advantage of predators. Easy to please, these ancestors of ours. But really this evolutionary-psychological explanation explains nothing.

What is it with evolutionary psychologists and the savanna, anyway? The environment of our ancestors, and our understanding of it, is absolutely crucial to the worldview of the evolutionary psychologist. Conventional Darwinians, seeking to explain the physical evolution of organisms, can resort to the fossil record, spotty as it is. But there can be no fossil record for the evolution of mental faculties; life on the savanna is invoked as a substitute for it. In a devastating critique in the New York Review of Books, Stephen Jay Gould summarized the scientific weaknesses of this approach:

How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter gatherers did in Africa two million years ago? . . . How can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about [the stone age environment]: relations of kinship, social structures and sizes of groups, different activities of males and females, the roles of religion, symbolizing, storytelling, and a hundred other central aspects of human life that cannot be traced in fossils? . . . The chief strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable, and therefore unscientific.

This hole at the center of evolutionary psychology has led to the charge that many of its farther-flung explanations, like those cited above, are mere “cocktail party speculation.” Gould’s critique provoked a furious backlash. In an unintentionally hilarious exchange in the NYRB, Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and a vigorous evangelist for evolutionary psychology, repeated the insinuation that Gould resists the truth because he is — brace yourself – – a closet theist. As Dennett has pointed out, in his many writings Gould even sometimes quotes the Bible! Gould responded in high dudgeon. He quotes the Bible only as great literature, Gould asserted, and, furthermore, he thinks the universe is just as aimless and pointless as Dennett does.

A more plausible argument could be made that much of the resistance to evolutionary psychology is political. This was certainly the case with sociobiology, when E. O. Wilson introduced the subject in the politically hyperactive 1970s. Left-wing scientists saw it as a recrudescence of 19th- century Social Darwinism, and a band of radical feminists expressed their reservations by crashing a conference and dumping a pitcher of ice water on Wilson’s head. Gould himself, as Dennett points out, is a self-described Marxist, and has been known to criticize other scientists in explicitly political terms.

The left-wingers may have a point, to judge by their political opposites. Political conservatives have lately been drawn to evolutionary psychology, as evidenced by favorable reviews of the field, and its offshoots, in Commentary (by Francis Fukuyama), Forbes ASAP (by Tom Wolfe), and National Review (by John O. McGinnis). It may seem odd that conservatives, best known for terrorizing right-thinking persons by their alliance with Jerry Falwell, the Christian Coalition, and other religious types, should embrace a philosophy so remorselessly materialistic and anti-theological. But the tent gets bigger by the day.

Evolutionary psychology holds a surface attraction for conservatives because it affirms something resembling a universal and intractable human nature. This is anathema to leftists, since it would thwart any political attempt to remake society along utopian lines. And the human nature thus revealed seems compatible with conservative beliefs and prejudices. Women are hard-wired for child-rearing, men for aggression and status-seeking. The family — the old-fashioned family, that is, with Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis, not Heather and her two mommies — is the fundamental social unit, designed by evolution as the most efficient means for the selfish gene to protect itself; so evolution favors family-friendly tax credits. Because individuals are indelibly self-interested, the market is the most rational allocator of resources. Humans are inclined to deceive others and themselves, so concentrations of governmental power should be avoided.

Of course this prompts a larger question: If natural selection is a Republican process, why did it create so many Democrats? All the more reason, say the evolutionary conservatives, to hurry up and embrace the new, expansive Darwinian worldview.

“Because evolutionary biology provides an informative picture of man and because citizens are rapidly assimilating that image,” McGinnis wrote in NR, ” any political movement that hopes to be successful must come to terms with the second rise of Darwinism.”

For the most part Pinker himself avoids political questions in How the Mind Works. He does make a point of rejecting the naturalistic fallacy — the argument that whatever happens in nature is good. “Science and morality,” he writes “are separate spheres of reasoning. Only by recognizing them as separate can we have them both.”

Pinker’s method of keeping them separate is instructive. He quotes with apparent approval Dennett’s argument that sentience — our experience of ourselves as autonomous selves — is a “cognitive illusion.” We are hunks of matter after all, animated by a very smart, genetically programmed computer. This is both the premise and conclusion of evolutionary psychology.

But moral reasoning may proceed, Pinker argues, by pretending otherwise.

“Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. . . . A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purpose of the discussion . . .”

Morality, in other words, is based on a pretense — on believing, provisionally, something science tells us is untrue; namely, that human beings are persons and not Meat Puppets. This will strike many people as a rather rickety platform from which to launch the pursuit of right and wrong.

But how rickety? We return at last to Pinker’s pickle — specifically his thoughts on the touchy subject of infanticide, as expressed in the New York Times Magazine, and the controversy, such as it was, that ensued.

Pinker’s article appeared on November 2, and a week later Michael Kelly called attention to it in a column for the Washington Post. “The article by Steven Pinker,” Kelly wrote, “did not go quite so far as to openly recommend the murder of infants. . . . But close enough, close enough.”

Pinker responded in a letter to the editor of the Post, calling Kelly’s article “grossly irresponsible,” and repeating the disclaimers Pinker had inserted in his original piece. “Killing a baby is an immoral act,” Pinker had written. “We can try to understand what would lead a mother to kill her newborn, remembering that to understand is not necessarily to forgive.”

We should dwell on Pinker’s Times piece in detail and at some length, for two reasons. First, it is a salutary example of how evolutionary psychology is “done,” and how the knowledge it claims to uncover might be applied to the practical world. And second, Pinker’s protest notwithstanding, Kelly is right. The nation’s preeminent evolutionary psychologist was not openly advocating the murder of infants. But close enough.

Pinker begins his Times article with two recent, highly publicized cases of neonaticide: the “prom mom” who gave birth to her baby and left him dead in the bathroom during a high school dance, and the two 18-year-olds who killed their newborn and dropped him in a dumpster outside their Delaware motel. “How could they do it?” Pinker asks. “Even a biologist’s cold calculations tell us that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence.”

Like most excursions in evolutionary psychology, Pinker’s piece is a kind of intellectual ragout — a pinch of ethnographic evidence, a tablespoon of generalizations from the contemporary scene, many assumptions about our savanna-loving ancestors, and large chunks of psychological surmise — served up with the certitude of the scientist. But let the diner beware: When you pick apart the ingredients, you discover they are not what Pinker says they are.

Neonaticide, Pinker writes, “has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history.” Practiced, of course; but accepted? To support this startling premise he relies heavily on the work of two evolutionary psychologists, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. They devoted a large part of their 1988 book Homicide to the murder of infants, in hopes of proving their thesis: “Infanticide can be the desperate decision of a rational strategist allocating scarce resources” — in other words, infanticide is not, as commonly understood, an act of depravity, but, under certain circumstances, a rational survival strategy.

They “proved” this thesis with a tenuous string of implausibilities. Conjecture solidifies into fact; the fact then becomes a premise for further conjecture, which in turn evolves into another factual premise, and so on. ” If we wish to understand human characteristics,” Daly and Wilson wrote, “we should study the hunting and gathering life-style in which and for which those characteristics have been shaped by natural selection.”

As Gould points out, this in itself is a dubious assertion, but Daly and Wilson stretched it to the point of absurdity. They began with the !Kung San, a tribe of foragers in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. One study from the 1980s showed that !Kung San women have babies several years apart, nurse them for as many as four years, and average five births over their reproductive life. The study further reported, for the period of observation, six infanticides in 500 live births, an incidence of 1.2 percent.

What may we extrapolate from this? Almost nothing, you might think. But you are not an evolutionary psychologist. From this one study of one small tribe living in the desert (not even the savanna!) in the 1980s — a study that uncovered all of six infanticides — Daly and Wilson believe they know how our maternal ancestors lived a million years ago and the conditions under which they might have killed their babies.

“The general features of a !Kung San woman’s reproductive career, . . .” they assert, “are indeed representative of hunter-gatherers and of the life history that characterized Homo for thousands of millennia.” This is nothing more than a guess, and not even a very scientific one. But conjecture becomes premise, and is then reported as fact by Pinker in the New York Times. (“Until very recently in human evolutionary history,” Pinker tells his readers, following Daly and Wilson, “mothers nursed their children for two to four years. . . . “)

This sort of overreaching continues throughout Daly and Wilson’s work, and so in Pinker’s article as well. Given the features of motherhood among the !Kung San — which, as we’ve seen, are now taken to be the “life history” of the entire species — they postulate that mothers will kill their infants for three reasons. First, if the paternity of the child is in question; second, if the child is of “poor quality” and “hence a poor prospect to contribute to parental fitness”; and third, “extrinsic circumstances,” like food scarcities or an “overburdening from the demands of older offspring.”

How to test this hypothesis? The psychologists knew they couldn’t rely on the !Kung San alone. They thus took a “random sample” of ethnographic studies of 60 foraging societies. Only 39 of the studies, it turned out, mentioned infanticide. And only 35 of those described the circumstances that led to the killing; and many of these, further, are “poorly documented.”

But Daly and Wilson are undeterred. They found 112 cases of infanticide in their sample of the ethnographic literature. And, remarkably enough, most of these cases fell under one or another of the three circumstances they foresaw. This, they say, confirms their premise: that women, thanks to evolution, have a genetically programmed capacity to kill their babies if it seems like the reasonable thing to do. “Whatever our moral sympathies in the matter,” they write, “we should recognize that the rejection of a newborn could be an adaptive (fitness-promoting) parental response.”

But alas: Daly and Wilson don’t say how many babies were born under such circumstances and yet weren’t killed. The point would seem crucial; otherwise we won’t know whether infanticide is taken as a rational “survival strategy” within those societies or is deemed an aberration. The ethnographic literature is evidently silent, for Wilson and Daly pass over it. But without an answer, they have proved nothing about the evolutionary history of infanticide.

The implausibilities continue to pile up. In the two American infanticides that Pinker is seeking to explain, none of the three circumstances in the Daly-Wilson hypothesis obtained. For both the “prom mom” and the Delaware couple, there were no questions about paternity. The babies were healthy. There were no older offspring to consider. And there are no food shortages in Delaware.

But the American girls, according to Pinker, were in the grip of “emotions [that], fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history.” Being young and single, they faced futures as mothers that were likely to be rough. The circumstances stirred those old genetic urges, and so they killed the kids. The circularity can get you dizzy.

Pinker understands, however, that to make his argument — that infanticide ” has been practiced and accepted in most cultures” because it is ingrained by natural selection — he cannot simply appeal to pre-civilized societies. Here again he invokes Wilson and Daly. “They have shown that the statistics on neonaticide in contemporary North America parallel those in the anthropological literature. The women who sacrifice their offspring tend to be young, poor, unmarried, and socially isolated.”

Again the data are weak, the interpretation a mishmash of guesswork and question-begging. What Pinker calls “North America” turns out to be Canada (he himself is Canadian, but even Canadians seldom make this mistake). Daly and Wilson studied Canadian homicide statistics from the 1970s and 1980s, to prove, among other things, that “infanticides in a modern western nation . . . match the pattern” predicted by evolutionary psychology.

The Canadian data revealed little about the circumstances under which infanticide took place — nothing about questionable paternity, or low income levels, or lack of maternal support. Even so Daly and Wilson could report that “infanticidal mothers in Canada are indeed more often unmarried than one would expect by chance.”

Here are the numbers: Two million babies were born in Canada between 1977 and 1983. Twelve percent, or 240,000, of these were to single women. There were 64 maternal homicides. Thirty-two of these were committed by unmarried mothers. By an amazing leap, Daly and Wilson take this as support for their belief that difficult life circumstances may trigger a hard-wired capacity for infanticide.

But surely the numbers show the reverse, and they do so quite emphatically. Of the 240,000 single mothers, more than 239,950 did not kill their babies. And the 32 mothers who did were convicted and imprisoned.

But of course! Anyone but an evolutionary psychologist would have predicted as much: Civilized societies do not “accept” infanticide, and it is in fact exceedingly rare. They deem it a moral horror, classify it as a crime, and punish it when it can be proved.

Such common understandings interfere with the gnostic enterprise of evolutionary psychology. Pinker merely sweeps them aside. Having assumed the truth of what Daly-Wilson failed to prove, he surveys contemporary practices, presenting the unlikely as fact. “The emotional response called bonding is far more complex than the popular view,” he writes. “A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.”

Can this be? It must be. The scheme of evolutionary psychology demands it. The mother must contain this rational calculator, programmed by her genes to calibrate her survival strategy in light of the arrival of the new burden.

The problem, of course, is that it isn’t true, as a quick trip to the maternity ward will show. Steve: Ask your more. But as with new mothers, so with civilized cultures in general. By tradition, Pinker says, our own societies coolly assess the newborn, too. “Full personhood,” he writes, “is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris.” This isn’t true either. Steve: Talk to a priest. Talk to a rabbi.

Critics of evolutionary psychology call these Just-So stories: They are true because the evolutionary psychologist asserts them to be true, even though every ordinary person knows them to be false. Just-So stories, dressed up as science, can be harmless enough, and even amusing, as when dopey Bob Arnot struggles on the Today Show to explain the existence of, say, the fat gene. But Pinker’s exercise in explaining infanticide shows just how sinister Just-So stories can be.

Having explained the evolutionary rationale for infanticide, Pinker moves on to moral philosophy. “So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide?” he asks. “The facts don’t make it easy.” Indeed, they force us ” to think the unthinkable.” As Kelly pointed out, one key to Pinker’s project is his reference to the work of Michael Tooley, a philosopher at the University of Colorado. Pinker paraphrases Tooley’s views (before pointing out that many people reject them). The reference is to Tooley’s 1983 work Abortion and Infanticide, which may very well be the creepiest book published since Gutenberg.

This is where you go to find the Pinkerian argument in hard-core form. Abortion and Infanticide is a 400-page, dispassionate, philosophically sophisticated, tightly reasoned brief for killing babies.

“There is some reason, then,” wrote Tooley in the book’s conclusion,

for thinking that the emergence of at least a limited capacity for thought- episodes [i.e., thinking] may take place at about the age of three months. Therefore . . . there will also be some reason for thinking that humans become quasi-persons at about three months.

The general picture that emerges is as follows. New-born humans are neither persons nor even quasi-persons, and their destruction is in no way intrinsically wrong. At about the age of three months, however, they probably acquire properties that are morally significant, and that makes it to some extent intrinsically wrong to destroy them.

In his Times article, Pinker did not claim to be making an argument; a forthright case for neonaticide might have raised eyebrows even at the Times Magazine. He comes to us as a scientist, lending his expertise to illuminate a confused question of social policy. But his reasoning closely follows Tooley’s brief. Both the philosopher and the scientist appeal to the ethnographic record, evolutionary theory, current cultural practices, and a highly technical definition of personhood. And both of them lead us to the same place.

If newborns are to have a right to life, Pinker says, they must possess ” morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess.” Among these are “a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals”; “an ability to reflect on ourselves”; “to form and savor plans for the future,” and so on. Thought-episodes, in Tooley’s jargon.

“And here’s the rub,” Pinker continues, “our immature neonates don’t possess these traits any more than mice do.” Unlike Tooley, Pinker doesn’t have the nerve to complete this syllogism, at least not in a family magazine. Persons have certain traits. Neonates don’t possess these traits. Therefore, neonates are not persons And therefore . . .

Here is Pinker’s pickle: Even he seems reluctant in public to follow the logic of evolutionary psychology to its ordained conclusion. Recall Robert Wright’s words about the new science: “Once truly grasped . . . it can entirely alter one’s perception of social reality.” And so it does. For the moment Pinker wants merely to normalize neonaticide — to make us see it not as a moral horror but as a genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation, as unavoidable as depth perception or opposable thumbs.

Needless to say, his view ignores a large swath of human experience. Or is it needless to say, these days? The best short treatment of infanticide was written by the Harvard historian William L. Langer, who got to the heart of the matter “The willful destruction of newborn babes,” he wrote in “Infanticide: A Historical Survey,” “has been viewed with abhorrence by Christians from the beginning of their era.” And the Christians, Langer noted, were following the Jews, whose Rabbinical Law saw infanticide as straightforward murder. Their logic was quite different from that of the evolutionary psychologist, of course, but just as inexorable. Human beings were persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious. And this is the common understanding that Steven Pinker — and indeed the new science that he represents with such skill and good cheer — means to undo.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.