Abstract

How could the fundamental mental operations which facilitate scientific theorizing be the product of natural selection, since it appears that such theoretical methods were neither used nor useful "in the cave"-i.e., in the sequence of environments in which selection took place? And if these wired-in information processing techniques were not selected for, how can we view rationality as an adaptation? It will be the purpose of this paper to address such questions as these, and in the process to sketch some of the considerations that an evolutionary account of rationality may involve. By describing the broad framework within which the evolution of rationality may eventually be understood, I hope to undermine the idea that evolutionary theory is somehow incapable of dealing with this characteristic and requires supplementation by some novel principle. A more modest ambition of the paper is to try to provoke those who think that there are special problems involved in this evolutionary inquiry to say what these problems are.