It warrants examining how well people can come to argue under supportive conditions, not only what they do under ordinary conditions. Sustained engagement of young people in dialogic argumentation yields more than the temporary “contextual effect” that Mercier & Sperber (M&S) identify in the target article. If such engagement were to become the norm, who can say what the argumentive potential of future generations is?

Cultural evolution explains not just when people tend to develop superstitions, but also what forms these beliefs take. Beliefs that are more resilient in the face of apparent refutations and more susceptible to occasional confirmation stand a greater chance of cultural success. This argument helps to dispel the impression that shamans are mere charlatans and believers are “faking it.”

Understanding how structure maps to function in the brain in terms of large-scale networks is critical to elucidating the brain basis of mental phenomena and mental disorders. Given that this mapping is many-to-many, I argue that researchers need to shift to a multivariate brain and behavior characterization to fully unravel the contributions of brain processes to typical and atypical function.

Abstract thought, in general, and – reasoning by analogy, in particular, have been said to reside at the very summit of human cognition. Leech et al. endeavor to comprehend the development of analogous thinking in human beings. Applying Leech et al.'s general approach to the evolution of analogical behavior in animals might also prove to be of considerable value.

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest that language is an organism, like us, and that our brains were not selected for Universal Grammar (UG) capacity; rather, languages were selected for learnability with minimal trial-and-error experience by our brains. This explanation is circular: Where did our brain's selective capacity to learn all and only UG-compliant languages come from?

We agree that emergent group-level properties are important; however, we disagree that current approaches, especially culture-gene coevolutionary (CGC) approaches, have neglected them. We explain how CGC helps demystify the tumult of humans' group-level complexity by “starting at the start,” and why (a) assuming undifferentiated individuals and (b) focusing on cooperation are actually powerful tools to this end.

We argue that although objectivist moral attitudes may facilitate cooperation, they are not necessary for the high levels of cooperation in humans. This is implied by evolutionary models that articulate a mechanism underlying Stanford's account, and is also suggested by the ability of merely conventional social norms to explain extreme human behaviors.

Cook et al. overstate the evidence supporting their associative account of mirror neurons in humans: most studies do not address a key property, action-specificity that generalizes across the visual and motor domains. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of neuroimaging data can address this concern, and we illustrate how MVPA can be used to test key predictions of their account.