Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Title: What would imaginary ancestors do?
Abstract: In recent work on human cognitive evolution, several biologists and philosophers have proposed broad, synthetic hypotheses in which they attempt to bring together knowledge from a wide range of disciplines into comprehensive narratives. These hypotheses are historically focused and phylogenetically constrained, their temporal scope makes them well-suited to tracing gradual changes in selective pressures over time, and their sequential causal structure means they need not commit to one sort of cause over another and so can easily incorporate adaptive hypotheses as well as environmental events or developmental constraints.
But human evolutionary theorists interested in building broad, comprehensive histories face a challenge: an explanatory standard of high causal detail in an area where the ideal sorts of evidence are relatively scarce. Their first response is to cast their net widely: they generally use a wide variety of evidential sources. Then, to maximize detail in the face of limited evidence, theorists employ various epistemic strategies to make the most of the evidence they have. In this talk, I will describe one kind of strategy that theorists use and argue that there is a persistent challenge to making this kind of strategy.
The strategy is connecting, either functionally within the same organisms or evolutionarily over generations, putative cognitive capacities of ancestral hominins to other cognitive capacities for which material evidence is available. Making these connections involves what I call a close-enough judgment, which, though not formally problematic, constitutes a potential weak point in the construction of human cognitive evolutionary narratives. Sometimes, theorists take certain connections among cognitive capacities to be intuitively plausible – so much so that they accept and include them in their hypotheses. I argue that when they make these plausibility judgments, they are actually attempting (explicitly or implicitly) to reason from the perspective of an ancestral hominin. They reason about whether some inference would be easy, natural, or obvious for a hominin with only a hypothesized set of ancestral capacities. When they do this, they invoke their intuitive sense of ease or obviousness as evidence for the association among cognitive capacities. But such intuitions are systematically misleading, because they are influenced by the very cognitive capacity whose evolution the theorist seeks to explain.
Title: What would imaginary ancestors do?
Abstract: In recent work on human cognitive evolution, several biologists and philosophers have proposed broad, synthetic hypotheses in which they attempt to bring together knowledge from a wide range of disciplines into comprehensive narratives. These hypotheses are historically focused and phylogenetically constrained, their temporal scope makes them well-suited to tracing gradual changes in selective pressures over time, and their sequential causal structure means they need not commit to one sort of cause over another and so can easily incorporate adaptive hypotheses as well as environmental events or developmental constraints.
But human evolutionary theorists interested in building broad, comprehensive histories face a challenge: an explanatory standard of high causal detail in an area where the ideal sorts of evidence are relatively scarce. Their first response is to cast their net widely: they generally use a wide variety of evidential sources. Then, to maximize detail in the face of limited evidence, theorists employ various epistemic strategies to make the most of the evidence they have. In this talk, I will describe one kind of strategy that theorists use and argue that there is a persistent challenge to making this kind of strategy.
The strategy is connecting, either functionally within the same organisms or evolutionarily over generations, putative cognitive capacities of ancestral hominins to other cognitive capacities for which material evidence is available. Making these connections involves what I call a close-enough judgment, which, though not formally problematic, constitutes a potential weak point in the construction of human cognitive evolutionary narratives. Sometimes, theorists take certain connections among cognitive capacities to be intuitively plausible – so much so that they accept and include them in their hypotheses. I argue that when they make these plausibility judgments, they are actually attempting (explicitly or implicitly) to reason from the perspective of an ancestral hominin. They reason about whether some inference would be easy, natural, or obvious for a hominin with only a hypothesized set of ancestral capacities. When they do this, they invoke their intuitive sense of ease or obviousness as evidence for the association among cognitive capacities. But such intuitions are systematically misleading, because they are influenced by the very cognitive capacity whose evolution the theorist seeks to explain.
