People have said I'm too argumentative; now I know why. And it's not my fault. ~ Ilene
This is an excerpt from "The argumentative ape: Why we're wired to persuade" – which is requires logging into New Scientist and is only available for 5 more days.
Excerpt: An elegant explanation may have arrived. Hugo Mercier at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Dan Sperber at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, believe that human reasoning evolved to help us to argue. An ability to argue convincingly would have been in our ancestors' interest as they evolved more advanced forms of communication, the researchers propose. Since the most persuasive lines of reasoning are not always the most logical, our brains' apparent foibles may result from this need to justify our actions and convince others to see our point of view – whether it is right or wrong. "You end up making decisions that look rational, rather than making genuinely rational decisions," says Mercier.
The flip side, of course, is that we also face the risk of being duped by others, so we developed a healthy scepticism and an ability to see the flaws in others' reasoning. This ability to argue back and forth may have been crucial to humanity's success – allowing us to come to extraordinary solutions as a group that we could never reach alone.
Mercier and Sperber are by no means the first to suggest that the human mind evolved to help us manage a complex social life. It has long been recognised that group living is fraught with mental challenges that could drive the evolution of the brain. Primates living in a large group have to form and maintain alliances, track who owes what to whom, and keep alert to being misled by others in the group. Sure enough, there is a very clear correlation between the number of individuals in a primate group, and the species' average brain size, providing support for the "social brain" – or "Machiavellian intelligence" – hypothesis (New Scientist, 24 September 2011, p 40).
