Cartographic Knowledge: Redefining Knowledge in Light of Evolutionary Theory An Anthropological Study

Abstract

Forms of knowledge with no direct link to survival—religious knowledge foremost among them—have long posed a challenge to evolutionary theory: the cost of belief in unseen deities is difficult to justify under natural selection, in the way that the cost of three-dimensional vision is not. This study locates the source of the difficulty in an epistemological assumption inherited from classical philosophy: that consciousness produces knowledge as a correspondence to reality, and therefore that some knowledge lies beyond the function of survival. Against this, it proposes the concept of "cartographic knowledge": consciousness is a multi-mechanism adaptive apparatus whose function is not to mirror reality but to draw a functional map of the environment, material and symbolic, by which the organism selects survival enhancing behavior. On this view, all knowledge, religious and non-religious alike, is map data generated within a single function; and since every representation is built from sense derived primitives, the religious image is not the reception of transcendent data but a recombination of sensed elements extrapolated beyond the sensed. The framework is offered as falsifiable, and it unifies otherwise scattered evolutionary accounts of religion — hypersensitive agency detection, theory of mind, and cultural evolution — within a single cartographic process. Its contribution is to reinsert every category of knowledge into the logic of evolution.