Evolution Again

D. Buss again (see prior post): "Ancestral conditions that favored the dissolution of a mateship constituted a recurrent adaptive problem over human evolutionary history and thus imposed selection pressures for the evolution of strategic solutions."(p. 171) The only selection pressure was on having an intact brain. The strategies are only an outgrowth of that. Each strategy isn't a trait undergoing selective pressure.

Humans today face a completely different landscape than those at the beginning of recorded history. Any evolutionary biologist would agree that it is too short a time for significant evolution via natural selection. And yet, we operate in this changed world without much difficulty. Without any appreciation for history, one might posit that humans are evolved to operate computers: our manual dexterity to enter keystrokes, our ability to multi-task many windows at once, even our language to write HTML code. This is of course preposterous, just as most of Dr. Buss's arguments are.

I think the important question is how we are able to adapt to such varied environments? How did we become repositories of information, manipulators of tools, possessors of language? These were the skills that when applied to old problems, such as having babies, yielded the many strategies discussed in Buss's book. For another example, writing is not evolved. It is an exaption born of our ability for language, but it is writing that has made today's civilizations possible.