Our interaction with people depends, obviously, on whom we are deal-
ing with. In contrast, our interaction with giraffes, snakes or hyenas
does not depend on whichanimal we are chasing or running away from
but on what species they belong to, and that may be why our brains are
biased not to notice the fascinating differences between giraffe faces. Or
again, consider artifacts such as tools. Watching a picture of an unfamil-
iar tool results in very specific brain activity, different from what occurs
when people watch pictures of unfamiliar animals. This activity involves
some of the motor control areas in the brain. But this is not too surpris-
ing in a species of toolmakers, in which organisms have for a very long
[116] time created tools far more complex than anything any other species
could come up with. Having special inference systems for tool-handling
confers a real advantage in this domain, allowing humans fast and flexi-
ble acquisition of complicated toolmaking techniques.
THE ARCHITECTURE AND THE DESIGNER
Once we realize that different species have a different take on what is
around (different categories and inference systems), it makes sense to
consider that this must have to do with the history of these different
species—in other words, with evolution.Our inference systems may be
there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent
in normal human environments for hundreds of thousands of years. I
emphasize these ancestral circumstances, which prevailed for much of
human history, because these are the conditions under which we
evolved as a distinct species: foraging for food in small nomadic
groups, where close cooperation is a matter of survival and informa-
tion is richly transmitted through example and communication. Com-
pared to the many generations of hunting game and gathering food,
recent advances such as agriculture, industry, and life in large groups
or states or cities are only a few seconds in evolutionary time. This
matters because we bear the traces of this evolutionary past in many
features of our behavior and most importantly in the ways our minds
are organized. To take a simple and familiar example, most humans
have a sweet tooth because sources of sugar and vitamins were few
and far between in our ancestral environments. A taste for rich
sources of such nutrients—the same goes for animal fat as a source of
energy and meat as a source of protein—developed simply because
whatever genes caused that propensity were very likely to spread.RELIGION EXPLAINED