Steven Pinker has written a very lengthy new book that, as the dust cover informs the reader,attempts to do for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 bestseller, TheLanguage Instinct. What The Language Instinct did was to expand on Pinkerand Bloom's (1990) thesis that language is an evolved system, an intricately designed setof mechanisms that must have been shaped by natural selection. What The LanguageInstinct did not do was provide a specific thesis about how language actually evolved. ThatPinker did not provide a theory of actual language origins in his 1994 book is not a weakness.Indeed, Pinker's work has provided a useful rubric for subsequent linguistic theorizing (cf.Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, & Knight, 1998). It is this directional strategy that also appearsto be at the heart of “how the mind works.” Critically, Pinker wants the reader tothink about three main ideas (see the interview with Pinker in The Evolutionist): (1)computation; (2) evolution; and (3) specialization.