The position of cognitive neuroscience today is to watch this video and conclude that the school of fish has a mechanism for drawing circles around sharks.
Saying that the brain has evolved a mechanism for performing some particular cognitive function is missing the same point: such functions emerge from the interactions of millions of tiny interacting elements. These functions persist, phylogenetically speaking, because they serve an adaptive purpose. Cognitive neuroscience has fallen into the bad habit of starting with macroscopic function and seeking the mechanism, when we should be starting with the microscopic mechanisms and seeing what they can do on a global scale.
Edit: I just read about what John Dewey (1894) called the psychologist's fallacy: "to confuse the standpoint of the observer and explainer with that of the fact observed". Couldn't have said it better myself.
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