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silent, except for a concession late in his career that some possible differences in the mental proclivities of the two sexes might be adaptations. On the question which universal human behavior patterns are spandrels, he drops a few suggestions—the early Holocene invention of writing and reading one—but he analyzes none. Gould feels no need to defend himself issue: “I am content to believe that the human brain became large natural selection, and for adaptive reasons—that is for some set of activities that our savanna ancestors could only perform with bigger brains.” The spandrels are just there, “often co-opted later in human history important secondary functions.” About the primary adaptation, the brain, that produced these secondary manifestations, nothing is said, in fact Gould’s whole stance suggests that nothing can be said about His spandrel-laden brain turns out in the end to be a behavioral and cultural equivalent of the blank slate—an array of blank spandrels, actually: unutilized, but ready to be picked up and decorated with whatever values, interests, and capacities history and culture have in mind.

This remarkable, not to say brazen, attempt by the most famous then or to us today. As noted, one example Gould does mention spandrel is the practice of writing and reading, since it is only about thousand years old. But what about a reality he conspicuously fails mention: spoken language? Writing and reading contrast markedly with general capacity from which they derive. Speech is not a by-product big brain but a genuine adaptive capacity. It is not remotely plausible to suggest that our ancestors on the savannas or anywhere else developed a big brain with lots of all-purpose intelligence and nothing plenty of empty spandrels, some of which in due course came to by language as we now know it. That would be a just-so story.

In actual fact, language appears in human beings as universally sweat glands or fingernails. The complex mental processes it makes use appear spontaneously and develop reliably toward mature linguistic competence with the same regularity everywhere. Moreover, language obvious and decisive survival and reproductive value in the Pleistocene. The pan-cultural features of language are structurally uniform ways that show adaptive design; they are not explainable except as Even factors that interfere with the development of language and mental equipment associated with it, such as autism and aphasia, in regular, diagnostically predictable ways. For Gould to have claimed such an intrinsic component of human conduct and mental experience as language could be a by-product of brain attributes that mysteriously arose in the savannas for unknown purposes ignores everything know about language. It is unimaginable that something as structurally complex and astoundingly functional as language could have appeared in the Pleistocene as a by-product of a brain that was growing in size to solve other, non-language-relevant problems.

Gould’s anti-adaptationism, his disparaging attempts to minimize actively deny connections between psychology, cultural forms, evolved capacities, is at the far end of a continuum. We could imagine bizarre position reflected at the opposite extreme by an equally strange hyper-adaptationism that posits configurations of specific genes to every feature of mental life you care to name: genes for composing appreciating fugues, for badminton, for square dancing, and for a tendency to take too much carry-on luggage onto airplanes. No one, of adaptation-denial and hyper-adaptationism that the truth about an evolved human nature will be found.

A persuasive middle position is staked out by Steven Pinker in How Mind Works and The Blank Slate. As a major proponent of understanding the human condition by analyzing evolved psychology, naturally opposes Gould’s psychological anti-adaptationism. As we earlier in this chapter, Pinker is also cautious about claiming that because some forms of human life are important to us, even “momentous activities like art, music, religion, and dreams,” they are