Does a passion to create drive the human species, making us utterly different from all other living things with which we share the planet? Or do our capacities for novelty, great and small, link smoothly to those in other species, so that human creativity is really a variant on a theme repeated countless times in the history of life? Are we to understand ourselves as expressing a “regional dialect” for innovation - unique and special in its own way to be sure, but nonetheless a restyling of universal evolutionary stratagems?

Stressing descent with modification, Darwinism seems to say that we are both special and mundane. Is this a fact of human evolution or a fact of evolution's inability to explain humanity? Just partially humbled by our place in the Earth's teeming pattern of life Darwinians reach, Prometheus-like, past psychology and even past philosophy to explain our behaviors, minds, and social forms in a language once reserved for debates about hybrid corn or fungus growing among ants. What is going on?

Blame it on the cognitive revolution. In the breezy days of behaviorist populism, evolution, following Darwin's lead, was content largely with speculations about the origins of instinct and drives. This was the thin end of the wedge that evolutionists have driven into the mind as behaviorism has thawed into cognitive science and the mysteries of consciousness, intention, self-awareness, and human genius returned from the fringes of scientific respectability to crowd the center of human science.