As Leonid Krushinsky has shown, in the lower stage of biological evolution, the behavior of animals is mainly influenced by instincts, while as the nervous system becomes more complex, learning (practice) plays an increasingly important role in adaptive behavior. In modern humans, with their differentiated cerebrum, behavior is largely determined by reason (Krushinsky 1986, pp. 135-6). At the same time, “the basis of intelligent action is an extremely broad norm of reaction; behaviors performed with the participation of reason can go far beyond the forms of behavior that arose as adaptations to specific living conditions” (Krushinsky 1986, p. 80). Since intelligence, as a late product of mixed selection, has not been refined by it as much as learning, the frequent solving of new problems can lead to neuroses (ibid., pp. 228-9).
Practice and intelligence are not exclusively human characteristics. Animals also have their own animal “traditions” and their own “intelligence.” However, the difference between an animal and a human is not purely quantitative, as Darwin saw it. The difference is qualitative: animals use means but remain in nature. Their means and methods do not form a domus that would separate itself from the natural habitat.
Robert Sapolsky points out that the broad reaction norm underlying human intelligence is itself a result of evolution (we would say mixed selection) that has freed the human brain from the tight control of the genetic program:
“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes” (Sapolsky 2017, p. 173).
The development of reason, with its broad norm of reaction, is synonymous to the development of counterfacts (counterfactuals). Counterfacts are, one might say, alternative facts—actions and things that could have been but were not done, that were not added to the stable cultural repertoire and were not passed on through learning. Counterfacts arose along with meanings as their random versions brought about by variations in plans and actions. In itself, this randomness was only the intersection of existing patterns: “what we see as fundamental randomness may be the result of simple interacting rules” (Page 2009, p. 38). As meanings evolved, counterfacts began to acquire their own meaning, transforming into an