by Steven Pinker
Pinker applies evolutionary psychology and computational theories of mind to explain vision, reasoning, emotion, social relations, and art as reverse-engineered adaptations. He argues the mind is a system of neural computers that natural selection shaped to solve the problems our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced, treating cognition as Darwinian engineering rather than the product of a blank slate.
In this collection, How the Mind Works references 4 other books and is cited by 2 other books.
It draws on The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Origin of Species.
It’s picked up by The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.
Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.
The books Pinker references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Pinker repeatedly cites Dawkins's Selfish Gene as the replicator-centreed theoretical foundation for his evolutionary-psychology account of how the mind was designed by natural selection.
Pinker builds on Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker to argue that cumulative selection is sufficient to explain the 'reverse-engineered' complexity of mental organs.
Pinker explicitly invokes Darwin's Origin of Species for the reverse-engineering rationale - treating organs of 'extreme perfection' like the mind as products of natural selection.
Pinker draws on Wright's Moral Animal and the broader evolutionary-psychology program to explain human emotions and social behavior as adapted mental modules.
The exact passages where other authors bring up “How the Mind Works” and what they take from it.
Pinker draws on How the Mind Works to explain why readers struggle with syntactic heaviness and to ground style rules in memory and attention constraints
Cited in
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Centuryby Steven Pinker
Gopnik engages extensively with Pinker's How the Mind Works on the evolutionary psychology of childhood, while challenging his nativist emphasis by showing how children's brains are specifically designed for flexible learning through exploration and play
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
2 steps back
Directly cited by
Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
This View of Life
David Sloan Wilson
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Tools of Titans
Tim Ferriss
Poor Charlie's Almanack
Charlie Munger
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Eric Jorgenson
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Daniel Dennett
4 shared citations
The Language Instinct
Steven Pinker
4 shared citations
The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker
3 shared citations
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Michael Pollan
3 shared citations
The Moral Animal
Robert Wright
2 shared citations
The Red Queen
Matt Ridley
2 shared citationsThis book and its direct connections. Hover a node to see its title, click to visit.
Hover a node to highlight its connections. Click to open the book page. Node size reflects total citation links.
