Is Man a Rational Animal?

From ancient times, philosophers have been proposing theories of human rationality. More recently, many evolutionary psychologists have been conducting studies which appear to show that, under certain conditions, humans are frequently irrational, or, at least, illogical. Nevertheless, the human species has survived and thrived and thus humans must have developed reasoning capacities which work successfully most of the time. I contend that, while Man may not be a logical animal, many of the our socalled “errors of reasoning” are rational depending on the circumstances; that the logical answer is not always the rational one; that claims that Man is irrational are based on a conflation of rationality and logic.