I’m not sure what you mean. I didn’t define reason in my response. What I said was: Reason, as used in the original article, is a perfectly valid survival characteristic, in that humans who are unable to reason would not be likely to procreate. Those individuals who were capable of reason would be more likely to survive long enough to pass their reasoning ability on to their descendants. Those individuals with a greater ability to reason would be even more likely than those with a weaker ability to survive and even thrive, and the greater capacity for reason would become desirable and even consciously selected-for (as a consequence of being able to reason), and thus over successive generations greater and greater ability to reason would develop.
Going backwards in time, as the ability to reason is more primitive, the survival advantage remains, until you reach that point at which you have that first spark that some had but others didn’t. The hominid who could think, however ponderously, his way through trapping an animal, or reaching that nearly-inaccessible fruit or beehive, had the advantage over his duller associates who couldn’t. Going even further back, the boundaries of what constitutes actual reason get blurry, but the precursors would still provide a survival advantage; the proto-cetaceans that envision working together to herd a school of fish into a tight ball to make it easier to eat. And so on.
My point being that the ability to reason would pretty much *have* to be reliable going all the way back through the evolution of animal life. If animals couldn’t reliably reason their way through situations, they wouldn’t be as likely to survive. We can trust our mind, as a product of evolution, because survival is a driver of evolution. Our ability to reason is the result of all of our ancestors successfully and reliably trusting to their reasoning in solving problems that their survival depended on. Reason didn’t appear fully-formed in modern humans; it is the result of many factors developing over millions of generations of life, and the elimination of faulty results and dead-end developments along the way.
How does reason relate to insects, in particular social insects like ants, bees, and termites?
Most of the animal biomass on the planet consists of tiny unreasoning worker and drone insects. Their survival seems strictly based on the fecundity of a relative few organisms, not any sort of brain-power.
“What I said was: Reason, as used in the original article, is a perfectly valid survival characteristic, in that humans who are unable to reason would not be likely to procreate.”
Your response is quite long.
Let’s just look at the above.
What evidence do you have for this?
And, again, if you are citing “reason” as a tangible definable objective trait inheritable and assignable within phenotype, and presumably genotype, you need to define it to even begin to approach evaluating your hypothesis that “humans who are unable to reason would not be likely to procreate”.