Is the human mind simply an over-achieving blank slate whose skills and inclinations develop under the tutelage of culture? Or is it a kind of Swiss-army knife, pre-equipped with tools designed to solve specific problems, and ill-suited for others? And if the mind does have an innate structure, then how did it come into being? These questions animate the work of MIT psychologist Steven Pinker, whose recent award-winning books -- The Language Instinct and How The Mind Works -- have put forth, in a persuasive and likable style, the strong argument for the modular mind, a mind propelled by natural selection to specific faculties.

You can see Pinker's evolution from Language to Mind as a movement from part to whole. Here's how the logic goes: the mind possesses a "language organ" or "generative grammar" or "deep structure" that predisposes individuals to develop spoken languages, and favors particular syntactical formations over others. (As a linguist, Pinker's specialty is the mind's eclectic handling of regular and irregular verbs, which turns out to have broad implications for the study of language acquisition.) And if our mind is "designed" for language the way our eyes are "designed" for detecting light waves, then surely naturally selection has played an important role in fostering that aptitude for speech. In other words, we're a linguistic animal: birds fly, fish swim, and humans speak.

If natural selection has optimized the mind for language, then perhaps our intelligence is not as general as is usually imagined -- perhaps our brains come equipped with precise tools, custom-tailored to both the environment of planet earth, and the intricate calculus of human society. This is the overarching argument of How The Mind Works, widening out from the language organ to the multiple modules of the human brain, from part to whole, following -- with some qualifications -- the path first charted by E. O. Wilson's "sociobiology" in the '70s.

At the heart of Pinker's work, and the work of other evolutionary psychologists, is a tantalizing syllogism: 1) all known human societies contain language, and it seems likely that this ubiquity reflects something physiologically hard-wired into the brain; 2) most known human societies also share other qualities besides language: property inheritance rituals, incest taboos, medicinal and recreational drug use, tool manufacture -- even, according to some studies, fear of snakes. Thus, if these attributes also appear in all human societies, then perhaps they too are part of the brain's computational equipment. In other words, when Pinker argues for a modular mind, he's not just talking about the old truisms of sexual drive and familial love, but far more precise resources.

The nature of those resources remains a matter of serious debate, and Pinker's work has sparked great controversy among feminist critics who see evolutionary psychology's portrait of gender differences as a trumped-up version of the old sexual stereotypes. Other critics -- like Stephen Jay Gould -- accept the premise of the modular mind, but believe that Pinker has overstated the existing evidence. And any attempt to attach evolutionary analysis to human experience inevitably triggers fears of Social Darwinism and eugenics. While Pinker's tone in both Language and Mind is cheerful and easy-going, he can be quick to dismiss the old-guard of The Standard Social Science Model: "The Mind, I claim, is not a single organ but a system of organs," he writes in the opening pages of Mind, "which we can think of as psychological faculties or mental modules. The entities now commonly evoked to explain the mind -- such as general intelligence, a capacity to form culture, and multipurpose learning strategies -- will surely go the way of protoplasm in biology and of earth, air, fire, and water in physics."

In person, Pinker is gentle and exceptionally eloquent, though there is a hint of reserve to his speech patterns, as if he were searching for the least controversial way to phrase his ideas. I met with him for about an hour in the FEED offices in downtown New York, and we had a wide-ranging conversation, covering the state of cognitive science, optical illusions, Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full, semiotics, and Noam Chomsky. We've divided the interview into three sections, and created a Loop for discussion of Pinker's work and the field of evolutionary psychology in general.

-- Steven Johnson