in the environment in which the mind evolved we often needed to accurately throw things but rarely needed to accurately drop things from moving objects. As a result, we developed excellent heuristics for throwing but not for dropping.
Yesterday, as I was taking a long bike ride, I thought to myself, my physique is much better suited to riding a bicycle than to running. Doesn’t that suggest that my prehistoric ancestors rode bicycles?
Anyway, I wonder if there is too much confirmation bias at work when we tell stories in which evolution explains what we are suited to doing and what we are not suited to doing.
[Update: Commenter Handle’s remarks, picking up on the bicycle example, are wise and worth reading.]
But your bicycle design was refined in an evolutionary entrepreneurial process of “educated trial-and-error”, over the course of, arguably, two centuries, to be as easy and natural for you to use as possible. And there is a wide variety of bicycles from which consumers can choose, and likely, based on your extensive experience, you picked the one best suited to you and well-tailored to your body, biking style, and other preferences. Indeed, you may have made further modifications to make sure the bike suited you even better, and of course, part of the bike’s evolutionary design was precisely to include those features that permitted you to make such fine adjustments.
When humans do anything well and easily, there is almost certainly some evolutionary story to tell. But it’s not necessarily the organic organism that evolved through natural selection of genotypes. The humans also evolved tools, entities, cultures, and institutions to suit them, in a way that could adapt in a much more rapid fashion than that permitted by biological processes.
And the direction of influence runs both ways through co-evolution, such that humans who had biological advantages in using artificial instruments tended to prosper more than their peer competitors. And you expect to see elite performers and elite designs eventually complement each other so well that they perform at a level that is many standard deviations away from the mean.
In Tyler Cowen’s “Average Is Over” narrative, marshmallow-test passers who are smart and are very good at working with technology – and even building new technology to complement their skills and nature – are going to pull as far ahead of the median worker as a Tour de France winner would pull ahead of the average bicycler.
Well said. Bicycles evolved.
On telling stories, I like Steven Pinker’s response to the claim that we can develop an evolutionary hypothesis for everything (scroll down for Pinker’s piece): http://edge.org/conversation/social_psychological_narrative
That said, there are plenty of junk evolutionary hypotheses floating around out there.
Bicycles are *still evolving* to better serve humans, and social constructions such as road layouts and traffic rules are evolving to serve people riding bicycles.
Our ancestors evolved bipedal motion and *that* allows all manner of things, including the bicycle.
It’s funny how kids these days ride bikes that look like the one the Singing Nun rode in the 1950s.
Your bicycle was “evolved” to be ridden by you, so this is no mystery.
Michael Phelps is a bigger mystery.
“The world that we live in today is both unnatural and highly unintuitive. The three major institutional features of our society—the market, representative democracy, and human rights—were all innovations that, at the time they were adopted, struck people as being completely crazy, absolutely contrary to human nature (which is why they were rejected throughout most of human history).”
I’m not an intellectual historian or anything, but how true is this, I have to wonder? If you think of a small hunter-gatherer tribe, you would expect they would barter amongst each other for various things like food and tools, if they hunted as a group, they might vote on whether to hunt say antelope or buffalo on a given day, and they’d have rules for how one member of the tribe could behave towards another. Aren’t markets, democracy, and human rights just adaptations and formalizations of those phenomena for bigger, more impersonal, more complex societies? Maybe this is a minor point, but I just don’t see the modern world as being as “unnatural and unintuitive” as Heath (and Alex) seem to suggest. It’s more complex in many ways, sure, but if its largely a product of reason, then reasonable people should be able to figure out how and why it works, no?
Also, “Heath is worried about the reenchantment of the world by ‘malware of the mind,’ ancient viruses of religion and mysticism now ramped up in power and sped by new media.” I don’t see that one, either. If you look at cross-country comparisons, there’s a pretty strong negative correlation between economic development and religiosity, isn’t there? This correlation is suddenly going to become positive? By what mechanism, exactly? Twitter and Facebook? Color me skeptical. I’m sure Mohammed wrote some pretty inspiring verses, but the Koran wasn’t written for a world where it had to compete for people’s attention with LOLcats and the Reddit meme factory.
Mohammed didn’t write the Qu’ran.
You know what I meant!
Handle’s comments are ALWAYS wise and worth reading.
Did the bicycle evolve? There is a bicycle exhibit at the Chicago museum of science and industry. Today’s bicycles are obvious descendants of the first bone shakers, in a way that humans certainly are not from blue green algae.
While there are other bicycle designs, recumbents and whatnot, most bikes haven’t changed much in a century. Tweaks, nothing more.
The mechanism of evolution is usually accomplished by the slow spread of a sequence of minor tweaks that, nevertheless, add up in a big way over time.
Anyway, judging from the fossil record, some creatures are so successful and well-adapted to their environments and ecological niches that they don’t seem to have changed much at all in millions of years. They still evolved to get that way.
Could we say that Harley Davidson evolved from those early bicycles? That seems like the obvious extension of your analogy. Humans evolved from single-cell organisms, which are still around, and the Harley evolved from those early bicycles, which are still around, also.
My ancestors did lots of spreadsheets and played wicked good air hockey.
A pair of “just-so” stories evolutionary biology seems to have popularized have always bothered me.
1. “Men are unfaithful because…” they make very little investment in their offspring, so they have an incentive to spread their seed around and procreate as prolifically as possible.
2. “Men, are pickier about physical attractiveness than women, and prefer young, attractive, healthy women because…” they want to make sure the woman will bear healthy offspring.
But, if 1. is true, there is little cost – and potential upside – to being attracted to just above every woman. And, if 2. is true, it can only mean that the man is instinctively expecting to pick just one woman (or maybe a very few), intends to make an investment in the children, and needs to be selective.
Either 1 is true, and men are unfaithful – but then have no reason to be picky – or 2 is true, and men are picky because they are faithful and will make investments in their children.
But it can’t be both.