Are Myths Valuable?

[DLJ]

Just checking... did you mean "symbolic processing of information" or processing of symbolic information?  Given that symbols are an input to the process and aren't stored anywhere in the system.


And is not 'reasoning' also a cause-and-effect biological mechanism? Trigger - algorithm - action.

Yes, but reasoning is both a vastly faster acting type of cause-and-effect biological mechanism, and a vastly more versatile one allowing a vastly larger number of instantly (evolutionary time scale) available responses in dealing with many selection pressures.

Most animals capable of complex behavior are capable of learned conditional response, many derived response derived from learned response.  The animal’s behavior would be influenced by a combination of instinctive behavior and learned conditional response.  With development of reason, the animal’s behavior now tilt very heavily towards derived response deriving from learned response, over learned conditional response and instinctive behavior.

Exactly.

Dennett, in his recent book From Bacteria to Bach and Back, makes a useful distinction between lifeforms:
"Darwinian creatures - born with their competencies pre-designed and fixed."
"Skinnerian creatures - who have, in addition to their hard-wired dispositions, the key disposition to adjust their behaviour in reaction to "reinforcement"..."
"Popperian creatures - who extract information about the cruel world and keep it handy, so they can use it to pretest hypothetical behaviours offline,..."
"Gregorian creatures - whose Umvelt is stocked with thinking tools, both abstract and concrete..."

Humans are (perhaps uniquely) in the latter group but retain elements of our heredity from the other three groups.