Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker recently examined a problem with understanding human cognition, particularly how the processes of biological evolution could explain the human ability to think abstractly, including the higher cognitive abilities for logic and math (hereafter, HCAs). Pinker credits the formulation of the problem of understanding human cognition and the evolutionary development of HCAs to the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace. Pinker states the following response to the question raised by Wallace: "…Nonetheless it is appropriate to engage the profound puzzle [Wallace] raised; namely, why do humans have the ability to pursue abstract intellectual feats such as science, mathematics, philosophy, and law, given that opportunities to exercise these talents did not exist in the foraging lifestyle in which humans evolved and would not have parlayed themselves into advantages in survival and reproduction even if they did?" Wallace claimed that while ancestral cognitive operations, such as those operations for perception and motor control, were the product of evolution, he disagreed with Charles Darwin’s view that HCAs are the product of evolution by natural selection. Wallace is not the only one to doubt that HCAs are the product of evolution. Contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel also rejects the view that HCAs are the product of evolution. Comparable to Wallace, although Nagel accepts that older operations of the brain, such as perception and motor control, are the product of evolution, Nagel denies that higher types of cognitive operations are the product of evolution. The aim of this dissertation is to argue that HCAs are the product of evolutionary processes, both natural selection and other mechanisms of change. The reason HCAs are the product of evolution is because HCAs are carried out by the neural reuse of older evolved brain regions. Neural reuse is the view that brain regions can be recruited for multiple cognitive uses. Ancestral brain regions, such as regions for perceptual and motor functions, can be reused for carrying out HCAs, such as language, logic, and math.

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Stunned by the implications of Colage's analysis of the cultural activation of the brain's Visual Word Form Area and the potential role of cultural neural reuse in the evolution of biology and culture, the authors build on his work in proposing a context for the first rudimentary hominin moral systems. They cross-reference six domains: neuroscience on sleep, creativity, plasticity, and the Left Hemisphere Interpreter; palaeobiology; cognitive science; philosophy; traditional archaeology; and cognitive archaeology's theories on sleep changes in Homo erectus and consequences for later humans. The authors hypothesize that the human genome, when analyzed with findings from neuroscience and cognitive science, will confirm the evolutionary timing of an internal running monologue and other neural components that constitute moral decision making. The authors rely on practical modern philosophers to identify continuities with earlier primates, and one major discontinuitysome bright white moral line that may have been crossed more than once during the long and successful tenure of Homo erectus on Earth.