Yes and no. There is a genetic component towards neural tendencies but they need to be nurtured to make the most out of those tendencies. We are all born with a vast neural network, as we mature the connections of our neural network reenforces certain neuro-networks and conections and others that aren't being used as much are weakened or lost to atrophy.
The ability to reason and logic does seem to be a mostly human ability in regards to Earths life forms. There a few other species that have some ability but it's very diminished and undeveloped compared to humans. More of a proto-logic.
Glis mostly covered this is his answer, but I'd like to emphasize that what we call "logical thought" is HIGHLY dependent upon culture and is a VERY modern cultural artifact.
One salient example comes from research where a form of IQ testing was performed on people in low-technology cultures in Africa and Asia. What researchers found was people did poorly when asked to think "logically" in the modern Western abstract sense, but did just fine when asked to think "logically" along functional categories.
For example, when asked "Which of these objects doesn't belong?" from a set including a knife, a stick, a hoe, and a dog, people in low technology cultures didn't always grasp the animate/inanimate distinction (saying the dog doesn't belong). Instead, they would group the knife, the stick, and the dog into a functional group (things that help you hunt for food) and say the hoe (which one doesn't use for hunting) was the odd object in the sample.
The above is only one example, but a large body of research from many disciplines largely reinforces that "logical thinking" (in the conventional Western sense) is a CAPACITY of the human brain, but it isn't something we do spontaneously or easily. Logical thinking has to be inculcated, reinforced, and practiced, because it is slow, difficult, and (until VERY recently in human evolution) was of limited survival value.
"....(until VERY recently in human evolution) was of limited survival value. " Or even a liability to survival for the species in a different point of our evolution.
@Glis -- That's true. The bias in our cognition is toward what's labeled Type 1 cognition, where we make rapid approximate associations that are "good enough" for survival.
A classic example is long tubular objects in grassy fields. If we make the rapid inference such objects COULD BE snakes, the evolutionary cost of avoiding all such objects (even if most of them are fallen tree branches) is small compared to the evolutionary cost of not realizing one "tree branch" actually IS a snake and ending up bitten.
Our hypothetical early human COULD take the time to logically catalog the salient differences between fallen tree branches and snakes, and to calculate the odds of being bitten given empirical tree branch/snake ratio (an example of what cognitive scientists call Type 2 cognition). But that's time Thag could better spend looking for food, chatting up the ladies, looking after his kids, etc.
This post was edited by OldSchoolTheSKOSlives at November 30, 2016 10:57 AM MST
Benedict Arnold 