Natural Evolution at the Level of the Individual Mind

Current research in cognitive science tends to describe cognition in terms of adaptation or optimization rather than genuine evolution. We advance the hypothesis that the laws governing biological evolution can be meaningfully transposed to the dynamics of thought within the mind of a healthy human individual. We argue that the main mechanisms of natural evolution can be mapped onto mental counterparts that can be formally and mathematically characterized. For instance, genetic variation could correspond to the generation of new ideas through imagination and association; selection to the experiential retention of thoughts enhancing coherence or predictive success; inheritance to the stabilization of mental configurations through memory; mutation to conceptual transformation; recombination to the synthesis of ideas; migration to the assimilation of external information; drift to stochastic fluctuations in attention; adaptation to the progressive optimization of internal models, etc. We propose two theoretical applications: the use of the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium to quantify cognitive homeostasis and the construction of a phylogenetic tree of thoughts to trace how ideas diversify and branch across an individual’s development, revealing how early cognitive patterns generate increasingly complex and abstract forms of reasoning. Our hypothesis provides a unified vocabulary linking neural plasticity, conceptual change and psychological development within the same evolutionary logic. Our framework could guide clinical psychology by interpreting cognitive rigidity as deviation from equilibrium, education by mapping stages of conceptual diversification and consolidation, neuroscience by viewing learning as selection on neural representations, and AI by enabling systems that evolve ideas rather than optimize tasks.