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The putative objective of natural selection is to embed those gene traits in individuals that will produce a maximal increase of inclusive The great evolutionary theorist William D. Hamilton defined fitness as the sum of a trait’s “effects, by any and all causal chains, relatives.” The primary way for individuals to ensure the survival of their gene tic material is to survive themselves. However, since share genetic material with our children, siblings, and other relatives, their survival is also systematically implicated in the evolutionary scheme seen from the individual’s point of view: in a multitude of ways, human beings and other animals favor their relatives over non-genetically-related members of the same species, and generally their own social group and their own species above other social groups and species. People, as Pinker puts it in his gloss on Richard Dawkins, do not “selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which evolved.”

The brain our genes built can be broken down into a number of what Kant might have called faculties, and what are today variously termed systems, reasoning engines, or, most commonly by evolutionary psychologists, modules. These account for the interests and capacities that suited the survival of our Pleistocene ancestors. They can explain general differences in our abilities—why, for example, most people might find easier to learn the words to a song than to learn their Social Security number; why people can more easily remember faces than they can recall names. Stemming largely from the work of Donald E. Brown, and inclusions from Tooby and Cosmides’s The Adapted Mind and writings Steven Pinker and Joseph Carroll, here is a selection from the very of innate, universal features and capabilities of the human mind:

• an intuitive physics that we use to keep track of how objects bounce, or bend;

• sense of biology that gives us a deep interest in plants and animals

• an intuitive engineering module for making tools and technologies— not only such processes as flaking stones, but for attaching objects to one another;

• a personal psychology based on the realization that others have minds like our own but entertain different beliefs and intentions;

• an intuitive sense of space, including imaginative mapping of the general environment;

• a tendency toward body adornment with paint, hairstyling, tattooing and decorative jewelry;

• an intuitive sense of numbers, understood exactly for small numbers of objects but extending to an ability to estimate quantities in place of a grasp of larger numbers;

• a feeling for probability, along with a capacity to track frequencies of events;

• an ability to read facial expressions that includes an inventory of universally recognizable patterns (sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, etc.);

• a precise ability to throw such objects as balls, rocks, and spears (including an acute sense of target distance and the correct moment of hand release);

• a fascination with or ga nized pitched sounds, rhythmically produced by the human voice or by instruments;

• an intuitive economics, involving an understanding of exchange of goods and of favors, along with an associated sense of fairness and reciprocity;

• a sense of justice, including obligations, rights, revenge, and what is deserved, sometimes involving the emotion of anger;

• logical abilities, including a faculty for using operators such as and, or, not, all, some, necessary, possible, and cause;

• and finally, a spontaneous capacity to learn and use language.

This last capacity is among the most astounding in the way that it the transition from infant to adult with a full command of a natural language, in literate societies but also