Humanities Forum hosts MIT prof's talk on how humans think

Bestselling author Steven Pinker drew a large crowd to Logan Hall yesterday. Yesterday's Humanities 100 class wasn't your typical midweek class session. Several hundred students, faculty, staff and community members turned out for a special lecture in Logan Hall featuring Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entitled "How the Mind Works." The talk, cosponsored by the Lief Lectureship in English, is the centerpiece of the Penn Humanities Forum's year-long examination of Human Nature. Pinker is the author of the 1998 best-selling book How the Mind Works, and has a new book coming out next week entitled, Words and Rules: Ingredients of Language. As Mark Liberman, the professor of Humanities 100, put it, "[Pinker] has found a way to engage a wider audience" in issues of neuroscience and the mind. And the wider range of interest in hearing Pinker's talk was apparent as audience members were forced to sit in the aisles, stand in the back of the room and squeeze into any available empty space. "This was an extraordinary occasion that drew students and faculty from medicine, engineering, education, arts and sciences and Wharton, as well as members of the public," said an enthusiastic Jennifer Conway, associate director of the Humanities Forum. Pinker's lecture focused on the question, "What is intelligence, and how can a hunk of mass -- such as a brain -- achieve it?" His theory is that the mind is a "system of specialized mental organs, shaped by natural selection, to solve problems faced by our ancestors during their evolutionary history as hunter-gathers." Although sometimes criticized as cynical, Pinker asserts that the "legacy of natural selection is not only the more animalistic traits of greed and competition, but also love, friendship and a sense of justice." Those relations were among the reasons Pinker was drawn to the Forum. "I was very excited by the idea of tying this work to the humanities because ultimately they are related." The unexpectedly large audience created a bit of anxiety for the organizers, who had to accommodate not only city fire-safety regulations, but also a private film crew on hand to tape the lecture. This crew was not associated with the Forum and placed additional demands upon the ultimately insufficiently sized room. Technical difficulties further complicated the afternoon session as Pinker's microphone worked only sporadically and nobody was available to fix it. "Yeah, things went wrong, but everyone was very patient, and I think that despite a few logistical problems, it was absolutely positive," Pinker said. After the lecture, Pinker traveled to a reception at the American Philosophical Society in Center City, where he engaged in further conversation on evolution and human nature with Charles Rosenberg, a Penn History and Sociology of Science professor, as well as several students and faculty members.