I'm not a fan of "as a species" arguments. It fails to understand potentiality, i.e., that something can remain substantially (or put another way, intrinsically

I'm not a fan of "as a species" arguments. It fails to understand potentiality, i.e., that something can remain substantially (or put another way, intrinsically) the same while changing. Development and the actualization of inherent potential are important to understand. A human baby cannot walk. If all you ever saw were infants, given "as a species" reasoning of this sort, you would conclude that human beings "as a species" have difficulty walking. Or basic literacy. Hundreds of years ago (not even) most people were illiterate. Today, literacy in developed countries at least is over 90%. Reasoning and knowing are like that in the sense that you have the potential to reason well and to know things, but you aren't born with these things actualized. Reasoning well requires practice and refinement, and coming to know things requires the exercise of reason. So you have the potential to develop the prior faculties developmentally and then the potential to refine those faculties once you have them. Also proper exercise of reason requires virtue. Vices corrupt the use of reason by introducing impure motives (envy might lead a person to deny truths he would prefer not be true, for example, or to accept sloppy reasoning because the conclusion is desired out of ill will). That it is easy for many people to blame individual things or root causes in a tidy way is not a fault with the species, but a fault with people who either want an easy scapegoat for their real or imagined predicament and want to shoehorn everything into a single, easy-to-blame box, or people who suck at reasoning.