Other areas were being mapped by anthropologists, who seemed to have some interest in my problem, but who were inclined (at that time) to say that wh… - Mary Midgley

"Cognition" cannot be "translated into circuitry." Learning and creativeness cannot be "defined as specific portions of the cognitive machinery." They cannot be because translating and defining are operations performed, not on the mean in any thinker's brain, but on language. Learning, knowing and so forth are words to describe the relation of a thinking subject (as a whole) to the things he thinks and talks about. Defining these words is clarifying their proper use, so as to get rid of whatever ambiguities and confusions dog them. Since these words describes functions of the whole thinking subject, they cannot be used to describe changes in "portions of the cognitive machinery" he uses to perform them. This would again be like saying that the carburetor had won the race, instead of the car of the driver. Carburators do not even know how to enter races, let alone win them. Winners need carburetors, and thinkers (including neurologists) need brain cells.

Still, people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not–speech, rationality, culture and the rest. Comparison must deal with these. I have tried to discuss some of the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they occur in what is, after a primate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit. I have tried to show these capabilites as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic structure of motives.

If we ask how creatures [bees] that act so elaborately against their private advantage can have evolved, the answer lies in their mode of reproduction. Most workers are sterile. The unit of selection is normally the whole community. Its prosperity depends on the efficiency of the workers. An uncooperative strain would simply revert toward the solitary life these insects started from and in which many would still remain..So it is natural to understand their evolution, as we would that of a plant, without reference to the plans or wishes of the individual bees.