@podknocker I think I’m still not being clear. Needless to say I’ve read the selfish gene, and many other books & papers on evolution, psychology & neuroscience. My job requires me to have a solid grounding in psychology & sociology.
The difficulty with your post above is that you’re giving humans knowledge of what fruit is healthy
before they know it is healthy. I’m fairly certain that Dawkins highlights in his book that genes do not have foresight. It’s a good case of correlation not equaling causation: because we survived we must be the best version. And it’s an example of survivorship bias (a version of that heuristic, concerning bomber plane armour during WWII, was famously discussed by Malcom Gladwell in one of his books).
The reality for evolution is complex…
Scenario 1
- humans move to new place with red fruit & blue fruit
- some can see the colour difference, some can’t
- some who can see the difference will be naturally attracted to one colour or the other, creating a small group who both see the red fruit & desire the red fruit
- people who eat the blue fruit tend to die
- slowly the group realise blue fruit is bad
- some people still can’t see blue fruit: without being assisted by those that can see the difference, they have a 50/50 chance of choosing the wrong fruit & slowly die out, likely producing less children
- within the population who can see red vs blue, some of them prefer blues. They also slowly die out & likely produce less children
- as the children of people who can see red vs blue & prefer red over blue grow up, they have a strong preference & the culture quickly adapts, whilst our genes also start to switch & trigger the desire for red
Just in that massively oversimplified option there are endless variables that we will never know the answers to. And, importantly, there is the interplay between nature & nurture that we currently have no way of unpicking which leads to what (eg, do your children love reading because your love of reading was passed on via the genes, or is it because your love of reading means you often sit with a book they copied your behaviour? That's far beyond our ability to currently measure at present.)
As for this: yes, I’m absolutely implying that our brains are flawed, for exactly the reasons I tried to explain. Our brains weren’t designed, they evolved. They are incredible, wondrous things that do analyse billions of inputs every second, yes. But they also discard even more data. We use patterns to try and predict what will happen, which lets us ignore lots of data. If our brain took time to process the data, we would become a thinking machine that isn’t able to act fast enough & we would get eaten. That’s a v helpful feature for escaping predators, but using pattern-making shortcuts creates a massive flaw allowing for heuristics & biases to appear which often lead to poor decision making (therapists, magicians & marketers deliberately exploit those weaknesses in different ways).
TL/DR: the brain is beautifully capable & flawed all at the same time.
Evolution is complex, messy & far from optimised. It’s a game of whatever is ‘good enough’ survives. There’s a lot of things that aren’t true in what you’ve written here. For example, that intelligence has improved. The simple answer to that is we have no way of knowing because intelligence has only been measured the late 19th Century. So the statement must be false by that alone. If you’re talking about brain size & density, I would very much expect a baby from 3000 years ago to have exactly the same capability as a child born today.
Humans are capable of incredible cultural evolution because we record information for the next generation to learn & build on. That is remarkable. And does lead to changes in the brain regions. That is a product of elasticity in the brain, similar to learning new things or our bodies adapting after losing sight or hearing. But it doesn’t change the brain we are born with at any kind of pace. The evolution I thought we were discussing is the classical physiological type, which happens slowly over millions of years. The impact of which, also creates a massive problem: our brains are expecting office life but our bodies are still wired for living in the open. Far from helpful, creating cognitive dissonance & stress that will reduce your lifespan in the long run.
Ah crap, this post got unnecessarily long. Probably not helpful to anyone. Happy to discuss more - probably best done via private messages as I think we’ve well & truly taken Jason’s post off-topic. That was definitely my fault- shouldn’t have responded to your initial post with a smart-arse retort, sorry Pod 😔