Long ago, human beings discovered that they could resolve specific technical questions – “How can I catch food?”, “How can I keep warm in my cave at night?”, “How can I avoid becoming food?” – by applying reason. They found they could answer these questions by thinking them through carefully, by generating and criticizing possible solutions, by trying out those solutions in practice and then refining them, and by remaining on the lookout for better solutions even when a given problem already had a passable solution.

We may call this discovery the turn to reason. It was a revolutionary move when it happened. The method of solving problems by applying reason to them quickly became a very successful competitor with older approaches such as brute force, or guesswork, or doing the first thing that comes into your head, or consulting the Juju, or copying others, or mindless repetition of past practice no matter how unsuccessful.