Even some of Pinker's admirers are, nevertheless, dubious about the breadth of his conclusions. Writing in the New York Review Of Books, Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at the University of London, commented wryly: "In its early days `psychology' was intrigued by the idea - ludricous in retrospect - that human society arose from the unconscious desire of sons to sleep with their mothers. Now there is a more subtle temptation; that the mind works the way it does because their great grandmothers gathered berries."
Steven Pinker is unperturbed by the criticism which he regards as a misinterpretation of his modest theories. "There is no single theory of how the mind works, no big theory of everything," he says. "But clearly the mind is a system, as the body is a system. And natural selection played a key role in forming that system."
We are, according to Pinker, chiefly theorists and liars. Theorists in our social interaction, in our desire to know "what that person is thinking about what I'm thinking." And liars because we are "not necessarily in dispassionate pursuit of the truth, but of whatever version of the truth advances our individual interests".
Truth in the cosmic sense is, of course, a different matter and one that Pinker wisely leaves to philosophers. But his scientific view is that "our human bent for theorising is taken to extremes in religious and magical beliefs. Those beliefs are, in a way, instances of going beyond the data and explaining physical events in terms of theoretical constructs that we now realise don't exist. At least those of us who are scientists see it that way."
If all this makes the most ardent romantic or beatific mystic seem like Mister Spock on a bad day, that is because most people mistakenly see evolution's role in the development of the human mind as crude programming, Pinker insists. "But we are not VCRs," he quips, "We react to each other not as hunks of matter but as interacting humans who observe things like death, dreams and trances."
Given that the tools we have are inadequate - that "we are still going to die, and that not everyone we love will love us in return" - we are left with perplexity. It is hardly surprising, after all, that a mind astonishingly good at one thing - making sense of the physical world and of the other minds around it - is ill-equipped to solve larger problems. "Perhaps our mental equipment forces us to conceive of a problem in ways that will never offer a solution," Pinker suggests a little apologetically, knowing that many people find the notion bleak. "I don't," he says, smiling.
Pinker's theories are not at all the equivalent of a moral shrug. "There has been a traditional equation of biological explanations with a dissolving of moral responsibility," he says. "But is and ought are separate worlds. Free will can survive in moral reasoning even if it has no scientific meaning."
Suddenly he is trying to recall Stephen Sondheim's lyrics for Leonard Bernstein's musical West Side Story. " `My mother was a junkie. My father wore a dress. Goodness, gracious, that's why I'm a mess.' Is that it?" We both hum the tune for a moment but cannot be sure that we've got it right. Pinker moves on to another fallacy: that intelligence is the aim of evolution.
"You hear this constantly taken for granted in statements like `I don't want to go out with him. He's not very evolved.' I even saw a bumper sticker the other day that read `Oh, Evolve!' But intelligence is just one option with costs as well as benefits."
In a recent letter to the New York Review Of Books, Pinker also refuted the notion that "big" is synonymous with "better" when it comes to the brain, pointing out that the human brain "guzzles nutrients, makes us vulnerable to blows and falls . . . and makes childbirth dangerous."
How The Mind Works repeatedly quotes Star Trek, The Twilight Zone and Doctor Strangelove. But Steven Pinker declines to commit himself on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence. "I can see it in a headline - Pinker Says No Alien Intelligence. Then the next day - Alien Intelligence Discovered. No thanks," he laughs. He will speculate that human beings are currently in a state of biological stasis. We are unlikely, in other words, to be developing new mental equipment. Perhaps, as Andy Clark, director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Boston, recently wrote: in Kinds Of Minds "We use intelligence to structure our environment so that we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so we can be dumb in peace."
Steven Pinker appears intent on destroying such peace. His next book ("just a small one") will be on language. Then "another big book" titled The Blank Slate will take him into the next millennium. "It will examine how two largely false ideas - the blank slate and the noble savage - have saturated our intellectual life," Pinker explains. For pleasure he reads "mostly magazines and non-fiction, maybe one novel a year." Is he too disciplined to read fiction? "Not at all," he replies, "I'm probably just too nerdy."
Steven Pinker will give a lecture on the subject of his book How The Mind Works in The Old Physics Theatre, Department of Engineering, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, at 3 p.m. on January 17th. Admission is free and tickets will be available from the Institute for Advanced Studies, 10 Burlington Road, Dublin, from January 12th (phone 6140100).