STEVEN PINKER: EVOLUTIONARY POP STAR

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His shoulder-length hair bouncing, Steve Pinker strides into the lecture hall like a rock star taking center stage. He flings his leather jacket over the back of a chair, fingers some chords on an electronic keyboard and flicks on his microphone. Over the next hour and a half, Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will treat 325 undergraduates to a series of demonstrations highlighting design glitches in that evanescent thing we call the mind.

He starts by projecting stereograms--two-dimensional images that produce three-dimensional illusions--onto a big movie screen. As the students stare, a pattern of chain-saw-wielding teddy bears magically gives rise to the image of a large, headless bear that seems to hover in space. Sometimes, explains Pinker, 43, the mind "sees" things that are not really there.

Why? In his new book, immodestly titled How the Mind Works (Norton; $29.95), Pinker suggests an intriguing if highly controversial answer. The mind, he says, is like an ancient, jerry-built computer program made up of dozens of specialized "modules," each honed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution. There are modules for stereo vision and manual dexterity, for understanding numbers and grammatical speech, for sexual jealousy and romantic love. Don't think of them as "detachable, snap-in components," he cautions. They're not visible to the naked eye "like the rump steak on the supermarket cow display." A mental module, he says, "probably looks more like roadkill, sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of the brain."

If How the Mind Works offers a smooth and surprisingly pleasant ride over some pretty rugged intellectual terrain, it is because Pinker writes in the same breezy style that brightens his classroom lectures. He likes to quote Mae West ("Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself") and Woody Allen ("I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics"), along with linguist Noam Chomsky, artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky and, of course, Charles Darwin. Pinker has a showman's sense for knowing "when to hold his reader's attention with an illustration or a joke," observed University of Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley in the New York Times Book Review last week. "No other science writer makes me laugh so much."

How the Mind Works is stirring up an academic hornet's nest. The ideas that anchor Pinker's book--an artful blend of artificial intelligence and evolutionary psychology--strike many experts as glibly superficial. To Pinker's credit, he has worked hard to make explicit the sometimes tenuous connection between robots, computers and the evolution of the human psyche. Without the models developed by computer scientists, Pinker baldly states at one point, "it would be impossible to make sense of the evolution of the mind."