Describe the evolutionary view of reasoning

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The evolutionary view of reasoning asks what kinds of thinking skills would provide a naturally selective advantage for humans in adapting to our environment across evolutionary time. To gain insight into human cognition, we should look to see what kinds of adaptations would have been most useful in the distant past. So we hypothesize on how human hunters and gatherers would have thought during time that predated the relatively recent development of agriculture and the very recent development of industrial societies.

How has evolution influenced human cognition? Humans may possess something like a schema acquisition device. It facilitates our ability to quickly glean important information from our experiences. It also helps us to organize that information into meaningful frameworks. In Cosmides's view, these schemas are highly flexible. But they also are specialized for selecting and organizing the information that will most effectively aid us in adapting to the situations we face. One of the distinctive adaptations shown by human hunters and gatherers has been in the area of social exchange. There are two kinds of inferences in particular that social exchange schemas facilitate: inferences related to cost–benefit relationships and inferences that help people detect when someone is cheating in a particular social exchange. In earlier times, working together may well have been even more important than it is today. Imagine one partner taking care of the children while the other partner goes out to hunt. When the hunter returns home, he shares the meat with the rest of the family in exchange for his partner having taken care of the offspring. Similarly, detecting a cheater who does not comply with rules may have made the difference between life and death.