if animals didn't show problem-solving skills, and thus reasoning, complex ones wouldn't exist anymore by now. Planning is a fundamental skill for survival in a resource-constrained environment and that's how intelligence evolved to begin with.
Assuming that intelligence and by extension reasoning are discrete steps is so backwards to me. They are quite obviously continuously connected all the way back to the first nervous systems.
Are they? Which animals? Some seem smart and maybe do it. Needs strong justification.
> probably through being trained on many examples of the laws of nature doing their thing
Is that how they can reason? Why do you think so? Sounds like something that needs strong justification.
> then why couldn't a statistical model be?
Maybe because that is not how anything in the world attained the ability to reason.
A lot of animals can see. They did not have to train for this. They are born with eyes and a brain.
Humans are born with the ability to recognize pattern in what we see. We can tell objects apart without training.