I then asked him to explain how alarm clocks worked, and I was impressed by how he adapted his explanation to what I had just told him about metal wires. He explained that there are lots of wires that go through the alarm clock, and that they are arranged in such a way that electricity made some things work one way and other things work another way. His explanation was crude, but it was clear that he had formed a rudimentary schema for how electrical signals could perform logic. He explained that the buttons on top sent electricity through different wires, so that when they were pushed the clock did something different—not really an explanation of how things work, but certainly a concept of function.

I had challenged him with some pretty complicated systems in a typically adult attempt to demonstrate the flaws in his thinking, but then it struck me that I had thought the same way when I was his age. Actually, I was flooded with memories from my childhood, even specific instances when my own callow intellect imagined omnipotent knowledge of the world and its mechanics.

I remembered believing that the true natures of things were accessible to me through contemplation. I recalled picturing in my head the inner workings of guns, telephones, electric motors, and all manner of other gadgets that guarded internal mysteries. Imagining a mechanism, however inaccurate it might have been, was comforting because it explained a mystery. Humans seem to need explanations for all things unknown, whether the details are right or wrong.

Marc Hauser, a Harvard professor of psychology, biology, and anthropology recently presented a theory of "humaniqueness," the cognitive features that single out humans as special. He identified four distinguishing ingredients of human thought, evolved mechanisms that allow us to find creative solutions to new problems through unique information processing skills. These novel skills are the capacity to 1) combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding, 2) apply the same "rule" or solution from one problem to a different or new situation, 3) create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input, and 4) detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

Hauser’s list addresses cognitive capacities, but what about cognitive imperatives? Are there specific cognitive drives that make us unique? I believe there are, and I must credit my son with pointing one of them out to me. This human imperative is the need to represent and explain the unknown in terms of the known. Indeed there might be a fifth cognitive capacity to add to Hauser’s list, depending upon how one interprets his first two cognitive skills. This drive is different from mere curiosity, a capacity that seems to extend beyond mammals and birds to some ectothermic vertebrates (e.g., turtles). The need to explain differs from curiosity in that it seeks a comprehensive description that encompasses object attributes such as origin, duration of existence, relationships to other entities, expected behaviors, and fate.

The human drive to explain is the root of our three knowledge systems, religion, philosophy, and science, each respectively defined by an increasing obedience to physical evidence. One might go so far as to assert that were it not for our burning desire to see beyond the horizon, to dissect and catalog, and to construct plausible models of mysterious phenomena our ancestors would never have left the African savannah, at least not as humans.

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