Differences Teach Us More Than Similarities: The Need for Evolutionary Thinking in Comparative Cognition

A persistent anthropocentric school of thought prevents comparative cognition from truly joining the evolutionary sciences, which often view "cognition" as an alien subject to the study of life.In this article, I argue that cognition is indeed inherent to all life and that we could study the evolution of cognitive skills like any other species-specific trait if we stop elevating convergence over differences, adopt an inclusive working definition of cognition, and choose new model organisms with a strong focus on phylogeny.