Follow the causal chain from top to bottom.
This page shows how our fundamental urges are shaped by evolution through natural selection.
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The survival of a human baby is particularly dependent on the pair bond of its parents
The helplessness of human babies meant that we had to care for them and, because of the harsh environment, their chances of survival were greatly increased if both parents cared for them.
Click here to go to the same node on Fundamentals 1
Traits that encourage us to care for our offspring are promoted by natural selection.
Because we are born prematurely we need to be cared for in our early years to survive.
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Attracting a mate with strong genes is a highly competitive process. We need to drive off other suitors for that mate.
To mate with someone with strong genes we have to be good at both romancing them and at fighting off competition for their attention, so, for example, Procreation Selection encourages Competing traits, traits that are used to drive away the same sex (stag antlers, big muscles and jealousy)
Click here to go to the same node on Fundamentals 1
Click here to go to the same node on Fundamentals 1
Human babies are all born prematurely, unable to fend for themselves
The large size of human baby heads and the narrowed birth canal caused by bipedalism meant that women physically could not give birth later
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Procreation selection promotes traits that help us to have and raise children and to ensure that those children have children of their own. The goal, then, is to have lots of grandchildren.
For our genes to thrive they have to get into the next generation. If not, they die with us.
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Procreation selection promotes traits that help us to have and raise children and to ensure that those children have children of their own. The goal, then, is to have lots of grandchildren.
Our memories are imperfect
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We do not have perfect access to outside information, and sometimes we have to proceed on assumptions, assumptions that are often incorrect (for instance, we use smell and taste to tell us if food is okay to eat, but poorly cooked chicken can taste great and still give us food poisoning).
Our senses are imperfect
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Our mind is not a perfect processor and often we are just not smart enough to take the correct course of action (for instance, our inability to intuitively judge probabilities can lead to us believing that we are better gamblers than we actually are).
Our minds are imperfect
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Natural selection gives us instructions that guide us to act in a way that benefits our genes, but they are vague and imprecise instructions and we can find loopholes in them that allow us to follow the instructions without benefitting our genes at all (such as the example of protected sex above).
Our emotional guidance systems are imperfect
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Natural selection has to trade off one benefit for another (they cannot all be optimal: birds are either good fliers or good runners, not both)
Natural selection is constrained by limited resources in the body and the environment
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Our basic mental make-up is still much the same as it was more than a million years ago
Being based on random factors (rather than being guided), evolution is generally a slow process. Civilization has not been around long enough for natural selection to dramatically change the underlying behavior patterns that developed over the last million or so years. Additionally, evolution does not work as fast today as in the harsh Pleistocene environment, when weak genes were quickly culled from the population
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Why we are almost as selfish as our genes.
Our genes are selfish, which does not mean that we as individuals have to be selfish, but the evidence suggests that we probably are.
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Natural selection depends on the slow accumulation of tiny changes; there are no big leaps in evolution. It works with the tools and materials available and makes small modifications to its design
The human body is so complex and delicately balanced that any radical mutation (being random) is unlikely to be beneficial. We evolve slowly with a clear path made up of tiny changes from who we were to we are.
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Traits can evolve that have no benefit, but are simply byproducts of traits that are beneficial (and thus have been promoted by natural selection). For example, male nipples are useless; they are a byproduct of female nipples that are not
Natural selection has no plan
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Natural selection does not work to optimize us, it works to optimize our genes. Natural selection’s purpose is not to make us happy, or fulfilled, or long lived or enlightened, it just wants us to be good at spreading genes.
Genes are the units that carry our design; a gene that made us have lots and lots of strong children, but then die shortly afterwards would be promoted by natural selection (our genes are selfish)
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Natural selection is not a perfect process, producing perfect results. For instance, the drives and urges that it programs into us are not specific and detailed, rather they are vague and imprecise. It gives us vague, general instructions that encourage behavior that will, only on average, not in every specific case, increase our survival chances.
Natural selection is limited by being based on a random process, reliant on small changes and subject to arms races, byproducts and hijacking. Natural selection guides us towards a solution that works better, on average, than not having the solution, but it is not necessarily the optimum solution.
Traits that increase our ability to give birth to children are promoted by natural selection.
The name of the game is procreation; it is our most important drive, and it pushes us to have children at all costs.
To get our genes into the next and subsequent generations we have to attract a mate, and we want that mate with strong genes, so that the combination of our and their genes will be strong.
To mate with someone with strong genes we have to be good at both romancing them and at fighting off competition for their attention, so, for example, Procreation Selection encourages Courting traits, traits that are attractive to the opposite sex (healthy hair, clear skin and a caring disposition).
Individual selection promotes traits that help us to survive.
We have to be able to survive at least long enough to have children
Kin selection promotes traits that encourage us to help those who share our genes
Kin selection promotes traits that encourage us to help those who share our genes
Natural selection has to trade off one benefit for another (they cannot all be optimal: birds are either good fliers or good runners, not both)
Natural selection has to trade off one benefit for another (they cannot all be optimal: birds are either good fliers or good runners, not both)
Natural selection is based on a random process; there is no design
Natural selection depends on random gene mutations
Two of the most powerful drivers of human nature are our insecurity (our fear) of the world around us, and our need to conceal that fear, even from ourselves (our facade).
We needed a fear of the future to motivate us to use our brains to come up with ways of surviving the harsh environment that we lived in (allowing a Generalist existence). We needed to conceal that fear to appear competent and confident to prospective mates. These two drives are at odds, which explains some of the stress that we feel as human beings.
Evolution
In order to understand how evolution has shaped us, we need to understand how natural selection operates. Evolution through natural selection fosters drives in us that will help our genes to spread through the population, but that does not mean that every thing that we do is in service of spreading our genes, because natural selection only gives us general urges to achieve that goal. For example, we want sex because that urge increased our chances of having children (procreation selection), but these days we still have the sex urge even when pregnancy is not the goal. That we are interested in protected sex, even though it has no direct biological advantage, is an indication of natural selection’s imperfection; it does not always make us behave the way that it would like. These imperfections influence our behavior in four ways: Forgetting, Assumptions, Intelligence, Loopholes (F.A.I.L.).
FORGETTING
We do not have perfect access to our prior experiences, and so do not necessarily behave appropriately (for instance, our selective memories can result in us returning to bad relationships because all that we vividly remembered was how good the sex was).
ASSUMPTIONS
We do not have perfect access to outside information, and sometimes we have to proceed on assumptions, assumptions that are often incorrect (for instance, we use smell and taste to tell us if food is okay to eat, but poorly cooked chicken can taste great and still give us food poisoning).
INTELLIGENCE
Evolution has provided us with a mind that is not a perfect processor and often we are just not smart enough to take the correct course of action (for instance, our inability to intuitively judge probabilities can lead to us believing that we are better gamblers than we actually are).
LOOPHOLES
Evolution through natural selection has given us instructions that guide us to act in a way that benefits our genes, but they are vague and imprecise instructions and we can find loopholes in them that allow us to follow the instructions without benefitting our genes at all (such as the example of protected sex above).