Comparative psychology gives us experiments that reveal shared patterns of inference and similarity detection in animals. Cognitive archaeology adds a second line of evidence by treating variation in tool production as a fossilized record of reasoning styles. Reading these lines together lets researchers test whether the same mental operations that support basic analogies in other animals could have been elaborated into the richer metaphorical thinking that marks human language.
Understanding analogy’s evolutionary path matters for anyone interested in human potential and inclusion. If core analogical skills have deep roots, then the cognitive space for metaphor, complex learning, and flexible communication may be more widely scaffolded than we assumed. Follow the full article to see how these strands connect and what that could mean for how we think about intelligence, culture, and who gets to participate in them.
Abstract
Analogy is central to human language and cognition. It has also been proposed to play an important role in language evolution. For these reasons, the evolution of analogy and the cognitive processes supporting it are an important explanatory target for evolutionary accounts of human language. We integrate data from comparative psychology and cognitive archaeology to investigate the evolution of analogy as well as its evolutionary foundations. We present evidence supporting the view that a number of capacities underlying analogy display evolutionary continuity between humans and nonhuman animals. In addition, we propose that analogical capacities can also be inferred from the archaeological record by looking at productional diversity in tool-making. To gain further insight into the evolution of complex human analogical capacities, we investigate comparative and archaeological evidence for one cognitive process intricately linked to complex forms of analogy and the evolution of language, that of metaphor. Overall, we propose an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the evolution of analogy and argue that analogy has deep evolutionary roots, supporting cognitive capacities such as metaphor and language.
