There are various animals with numerical and geometrical skills. Curiously some birds such as crows and parrots are very skilled. Dogs have considerable social skills and language comprehension, as I know from being a long term dog lover and owning 3, but they have almost no numerical and spatial reasoning. Some animals appear to have had some natural selection for numerical and spatial reasoning. We humans with our frontal vision, hands and motor skill have a well developed ability. Our abilities outstrip the original selection mechanism or need. There seems to be no evolutionary advantage to knowing algebraic topology.
LC On Sunday, June 17, 2018 at 9:28:00 AM UTC-5, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: > > > "In the past decades, recent paradigm shifts in ethology, psychology, > and the social sciences have given rise to various new disciplines like > cognitive ethology and evolutionary psychology. These disciplines use > concepts and theories of evolutionary biology to understand and explain > the design, function and origin of the brain. I shall argue that there > are several good reasons why this approach could also apply to human > mathematical abilities. I will review evidence from various disciplines > (cognitive ethology, cognitive psychology, cognitive archaeology and > neuropsychology) that suggests that the human capacity for mathematics > is a category-specific domain of knowledge, hard-wired in the brain, > which can be explained as the result of natural selection." > > Helen De Cruz. Towards a Darwinian approach to mathematics. Foundations > of science 11, no. 1-2 (2006): 157-196. > > https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226764172_Towards_a_Darwinian_Approach_to_Mathematics > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
