Classical social sciences, until now, have managed to grow without the help of any satisficing theory of the human mind. What began as an exploit is beginning to be felt as a hindrance. It is often admitted that the human mind is essentially what culture does with it: a blank slate or a tabula rasa. It is also often portraited as a coherent whole capable of making decision and justifying actions: it is coherent and intentional. We disagree on both points: we do not view the human brain as coherent or determined by culture only.

The human mind is not a blank slate. It is the imperfect work of a complex evolution. As in any animals, it endowed him with certain hardwired mechanisms, such as fear, shame or attachment, and mental devices such as color vision, face recognition, language acquisition). Culture can play with these contraptions, but it cannot suffice to create them, and its grasp on their inner workings is limited. This does not mean that the brain cannot learn anything (which is obviously false); it only denotes the fact that some things are more learnable than others. For example, it is possible to become phobiac about elevators, planes or cars, since these things are obviously dangerous. But far more often, phobias concern snakes or spiders, harmless compared to cars, but much more frequent in our ancestors' environment. The Human Mind is just leaving the factory of Evolution, and still bears the mark of its maker.

Among these mechanisms, some inborn, some nurtured, most of them both of these, some are fairly dissociable from the rest of the mind. It is possible to loose the capacity to speak, to recognize faces, to read, with the rest of cognition reamining as weel as intact. The brain is not that coherent a whole not to allow some of its parts to work quite autonomously. These parts are usually called modules. Their function and localisation are often quite specific, their activity fast, unconscious, and beyond voluntary control. Indeed, advertisment precisely taps this mandatory character of modules: you cannot refrain from understanding a sentence pronounced in your language, nor can you help recognizing a familiar face. Likewise, some moral feelings act upon us as compelling intuitions, sometimes impossible to justify on rational, or merely verbal, grounds.

These discoveries condemn the classical opposition, in the social sciences, between individualism and holism; neither is accurate, for the study of culture begins at the infra-individual level, in the human brain.

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