born with such intuitions hard-wired in their brains, but the intuitions show
up during child development in a wide range of environments. Let us take a
closer look at the basic ontological categories and how they are related to
evolved cognitive mechanisms. As we have already noted, agents (which we
detect quickly and automatically) include animals and humans, but there are
expectations reserved for humans, such as the use of language. Expecting
“thinking,”emotions, and intentionality seems a less straightforward matter:
people often have such expectations toward“intelligent animals”such as dogs
and chimpanzees but seldom toward earthworms. HUMAN and ANIMAL are
thus categories of agents, of which we also expect biological properties such as
having offspring like themselves and seeking food (Barrett, 2008). At a young
age, children perceive a fundamental division between animals and all other
things, followed by the perception of a cut between plants and non-living
things (Medin & Atran, 2004, p. 971). PLANT is thus another category of
living things, yet we do not expect plants to have many of the features
expected of humans and animals. Most importantly, plants are not agents
(they do not run away from you or chase you) and do not exhibit psycho-
logical properties (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998). We have already mentioned
that tools occupy an important place among non-living things. ARTIFACT is
thus another ontological category with related expectations about purpose and
human design (see section 2.2.3). Other things in the world are expected to
belong to the category of NATURAL OBJECT. However, different kinds of
substances have important characteristics that we probably expect intuitively.
For example, we expect all things (in all of the above-mentioned categories) to
occupy a single physical space and not being able to penetrate each other.
However,fluids and gasses defy those rules. There are many other nuances
related to the use of evolved expectations and ontological categories, which we
will discuss as they become relevant later in the book.
2.2.5 RecursionThe domain-independent use of recursion is an evolved cognitive trait in
humans. Recursion means the repeated application of a calculation to the
outcome of the same calculation. For example, after learning thefirst couple of
natural numbers, children are able to learn the general rule of increasing a
number by one to get the next number and conceptualize an endless chain of
integers. Chimpanzees can learn to handle a few natural numbers but never
recognize the recursive patterns (Hauser et al., 2002). Arguably, this human
cognitive ability is needed to think about omniscient and omnipresent gods as
well as other such“boundless”qualities of religious concepts (Czachesz,
2012b). Recursion is an example of an evolved trait that contributes to a
rather abstract theological concept, which is also important in biblical
Evolution 35