When it comes to entering a human brain and staying there, scientific representations share the fate of all other cultural representations: they have to deal with a brain endowed by Evolution with a set of basic intuitions, which are sometimes called 'naive theories'. Psychologists and Anthropologists have described naive theories of number, causality, space, biology, taxonomy, etc. The most famous among these folk theories is our Theory of Mind, our brain's innate psychology. These theories were hypothesized to account for children's surprizing certainties, which they show very early, sometimes a few days after being born. It also explains various similarities between sciences on several continents, for example how several features of Maya biology can fit on Carl von Linné's system.

Representations spread by the Scientific Revolution, as well as the 'ethnosciences', were built with, and against, these basic intuitions. Some sciences (such as geometry) seem to have directly sprung from it. Some others, such as probabilistic theory, quantum mechanics, or evolutionary theory, stand in jarring contradiction with our brain's inborn beliefs. Each and every bit of culture dealing with knowledge has to face the power of these evolved mechanisms. How can they deceive, seduce, and hopefully prevail over, intuitions that were not built to seek the truth (only) ?

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