The Evolutionary Cognitive Intuition Bias (ECIB): Why the deep universe feels counterintuitive, and how human culture learns to transcend its own limits

Although modern physics describes the universe with unprecedented precision, its two pillars (quantum mechanics and relativity) remain deeply counterintuitive, even for the specialists who master their equations. This work proposes that such counterintuitiveness is not a failure of intelligence, but the predictable imprint of our evolutionary history. This treatise presents and develops the Evolutionary Cognitive Intuition Bias (ECIB): the hypothesis that human cognitive architecture was optimized by natural selection to interpret a macroscopic, low-velocity, weak-gravity environment (the world of solid objects, contact causality, linear time and Euclidean space), and that building intuitions about phenomena alien to that ancestral environment imposes a systematic and universal cognitive cost. The thesis integrates five bodies of literature: evolutionary psychology (evolutionary mismatch), predictive neuroscience (the Bayesian brain and priors learned from the environment), embodied cognition, core knowledge in infant development, and the neuroscience of reasoning (prefrontal inhibitory control). It derives testable predictions and an experimental programme, discusses the main objections and limitations (including the classic critique of adaptationism), and argues that cumulative culture (mathematics, notation, instruments) is the technology with which our species compensates for, and transcends, the limits of its own intuition.