Rating: 
Summary: good cognitive science, very fuzzy biology
Review: How the Mind Works shows what happens when a solid scholar in one field becomes enamored of another. Pinker is a wonderful writer and very effective when explaining language; but his understanding and feel for evolutionary biology are truly shallow, and his resorts to adaptation are usually simplistic that they read like a college term paper. So the book is very much a mixed bag.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book if you are interested in mind mechanics.
Review: I really enjoyed this book---it was hard to put down. It's educational and gives the feeling of being in a really fun classroom teaching mind mechanics. It would be a good idea, however, to have a dictionary nearby. Mr. Pinker is highly educated and a few words might be unfamiliar to some people. I hope it comes out on tape and soon.
Rating: 
Summary: I would like to give 5 stars to this book.
Review: Because of my shyness I coun't give a 5 stars. My moral code impossed me to give only 4. As I work for peace, and the book is too explicitly pro violence, in the sense of how evolution is moraless, l have to break with Dr. Pinker dominant instinct. Accurate and intelligent, this enfant terrible of the neural sciences deserves to be in the top. I am participating in Costa Rica in a symposium for the contribution of psycology to peace and wished Dr. Pinker to be around to give his iconoclast vision of peace.
Rating:
Summary: Pinker's book is academic excellence made readable to all.
Review: Pinker's How the Mind Works book is the best synthesis of the state of the art about mental processes but significantly it is also one of the first syntheses of the relation between human mind and culture. More than a product of evolutionary psychology this work is the product of 'neuroanthropology' (Pinker doesn't use that term; Damasio uses the term in cognitive sciences though Victor Turner coined it decades ago in Anthropology). Pinker explains the mental universals of people engaged in collective interaction to negotiate cultural processes. If Pinker holds that all humans have the same intuitive capacities for language, psychology, engineeering, physics, chemistry, arts, music, etc and the religious intuition, and if he holds that some capitalist and behavioral dynamics are attacking these survival universals by imposing anti-natural codes, then he is also one of the most radical thinker of this end of century. How the Mind Works is not only brilliant and readable but one of the most relevant and critical intellectual productions for this era of globalization when powerful sectors of humanity are embarking into even more anti-natural collective dynamics. Pinker indicates that in this context where humanity is either creating new universals or modulating the 3 million yr old ones into innovative definitions of universality, academics must stand for intelligent vigilance through interdisciplinary research and also engage in disseminating public understanding of science in order to allow people to not only understand the human mind but use this knowledge to ensure human survival. I recommend this book as text for Anthropology courses and hope it is used in many Introductory courses in universities because it establishes a basic interpretive framework to contextualize any human endeavor or academic discipline.
Rating:
Summary: Insights that change the way you think
Review: There have been stunning advances in neuro-sciences. At last scientists are starting to understand a little of how the mind works and, more remarkably, it's limits. This is the first book that makes these advances accessible, this is accomplished with unusual agility and humor.It is just a shame that the evolutionary underpinnings of the book seem to attract wacky criticism. My only criticism of the book is that Steven Pinker spends too much time trying to assuage the anticipated attackers, instead of concentrating on the fascinating evidence at hand. This book will become a classic! Way to go Steven!! Thank you.
Rating:
Summary: interesting but flawed
Review: This book is interesting and had me thinking so I can easily recommend it. Unfortunately there are a couple of things that troubled me. I have an autistic son and the one page about autism implied a lot more understanding and consensus about this condition than I believe exists. I can't help wondering if this overconfidence is a problem in other parts of the book where I don't have any prior knowledge. I was also troubled about the tone he used toward religion. I don't expect belief or even the suspension of disbelief but I came away wondering if Steven Pinker thought that all religious leaders were not only wrong but knew that they were wrong. Comments about shamans and Jesus stick out. I wonder if the same sort of "I'm right and their blatently wrong" attitude affected his assessment of scientists who disagreed with him. These two points would be minor nits if I could point to other parts of the book that I thought were right on target. Since I am new to the subject I will have to leave it as this book was fascinating but I need to do some more reading.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of time
Review: If you know anything about the brain or evolution or even about how actual science is done, this book will read as just more propaganda from the evolutionary psychology camp. There is really nothing new here or particularly controversial. It is mainly a collection of obvious "just so" stories. Pinker's efforts are especially problematic as the book drones on and on and sloppy hand waving substitutes more and more for any kind of scientific analysis. If you're not familiar with the areas he's writing about or with the scientific method, the book is even more problematic because you might actually be lured into believing his stories and thinking that they actually represent a bona fide scientific way of making sense of the world. ("Hey yeah! I must like playing Quake because those skills were important on the savanna.") Besides the ideas in this book being obvious and/or unfalsifiable, the writing is really annoying. If what passes for wit in science writing is recycling other people's old jokes and making constant references to pop culture, I'll take non-witty any day.
Rating:
Summary: Great REading
Review: Pinker is funny, entertaining and rational. One of the great reading about mind and human behaviors. Must read it.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoughtful opus, but with an agenda
Review: I believe that anyone interested in the mind should read this book not because it is definitive but because it stimulates thought on mental processes. The thing that I didn't like about the book is that the author misses some topics during the agenda that he presents. He rejects any mystery in the evolution of the planet and suggests everything is mechanical, which some factually observed phenomenona like psychokinesis has proven false. He reduces God to a man made concept and this is impossible since most religions liken God to a mysterious force and do not try to scientifically define him. Any way the book is still widely interesting and as long as you are not a gullible reader, I think it would be beneficial to learn about what he has to say.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read, regardless of your preconceptions
Review: You can see from the flurry of comment that "How the Mind works" has generated here that Pinker isn't in the business of pulling punches. He is in the business giving a witty and spirited defence of the "adaptationist" side of the cognitive science camp. (I particularly enjoyed his efforts to rehabilitate the term itself, which is generally used as a perjorative.) Also refreshing are Pinker's good-natured jabs at the "post-structuralist" and "deconstructivist" orthodoxies that are pervasive in humanities departments in Europe and North America. I've been recommending this book to my more open-minded friends primarily because he presents the case for certain human mental "artifacts" being adaptive (and thus visible to natural selection) without caricaturing the opposite viewpoint. He also makes a compelling case that not everything is adaptive -- using music as an example, he argues that certain common cultural features are more adequately viewed as technological developments -- not adaptive evolutionary "instincts". In any event, Pinker presents to a wide audience a theory that is subject to experimental falsification -- this is rare enough in the cognitive sciences, and is worthy of emulation. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that the book is well-written, and a pleasure to read -- worth your time in its own right.
| 
