Abstract

Philosophers’ appeals to the processes of natural selection that are adaptive in terms of survival provide an incomplete picture of what naturalists have available to them to make the sort of defense skeptics claim cannot be made. To supplement this picture, we provide evidence from what Darwin called “sexual selection” and also what others now call “social selection” to provide a more complete picture of why it is reasonable to suppose that evolution has supplied human beings and many other animals highly reliable and also veridical cognitive processes.