Abstract Our mind makes doing science and creating knowledge about the world possible. It allows for vision needed to make observations, memory to recall what we observe, language to express what we observe, and reason to solve problems and develop scientific methods. We have evolved these methodological abilities of the mind over time and use them to be able to study, experiment and acquire knowledge of the world. Our mind shapes how we get by and make sense of our natural and social environment, on the one hand. On the other, we face cognitive and sensory constraints imposed by nature and evolution, and also constraints on the methods and instruments we develop using our mind. They set the scope within which we are able to do science and create knowledge about the world. Many phenomena in the world—given our cognitive and perceptual limitations—fall below or lay beyond the directly observable conditions in which our mind and senses have evolved (from atoms, magnetic fields and gravitation to the speed of light and planetary systems). The further we move away from these conditions—from the surface of the earth, from our ecological niche, from our particular context—we generally require greater abstraction of the phenomena we study. Because our mind makes reasoning and creating knowledge possible, we can best understand our mind’s abilities by studying how they have evolved to enable us to reason and create knowledge the way we do.