From the promotional material for Gary Marcus' new book Kluge:
"Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature."
Damn, that's clever. I wish I had thought of that. From Chapter 1 of The Accidental Mind:
"It is the widely assumed that since the mind is in the brain, and this is a great achievement, that the design and function of the brain must then be elegant and efficient. In short, it is imagined by many that the brain is well-engineered. Nothing could be further from the truth. The brain is, to use one of my favorite words, a kludge (pronounced ‘klooj’), a design that is inefficient, inelegant and unfathomable, but which nevertheless works. More evocatively, in the words of the military historian Jackson Granholm, a kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole”. What I hope to show here is that at every level of brain organization, from regions and circuits to cells and molecules, the brain is an inelegant and inefficient agglomeration of stuff, which nonetheless works surprisingly well. The brain is not an optimized generic problem solving machine. It was not designed at once, by a genius inventor, on a blank piece of paper. Rather, it is a very peculiar edifice which reflects millions of years of evolutionary history. In many cases, the brain has adopted solutions to particular problems in the distant past which have remained over time and have been recycled for other uses or have severely constrained the possibilities for further change. What’s important about this point as applied to the brain is not merely that it challenges the notion of optimized design. Rather, appreciation of the quirky engineering of the brain can provide insights into some of the deepest and most particularly human aspects of experience, both in day-to-day behavior and in cases of injury and disease."
So, I had a good laugh today, when reading a review of Marcus' book in Nature by Sandra Aamodt which included the following.
"In Kluge, psychologist Gary Marcus presents a lively tour of the shortcomings of human minds and concludes that evolution has left us with something of a mess. In an argument reminiscent of David Linden's The Accidental Mind, Marcus makes his case by describing cognitive difficulties, including false beliefs, linguistic ambiguity, impulsiveness and mental illness."
Yeah. Sumbitch eatin' mah lunch.