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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

We just had this discussion yesterday at a StartupDrinks. I think the Darwinian notion says:

1.) We are hardwired to want things to attract mates. 2.) Power, Success, Prestige, Freedom, etc. are attractive. 3.) We want things that are derivative of such things, even if we consciously believe we want to benefit humanity, think it's, fun etc.

Conclusion: The mind has a way of aligning our conscious interests with our subconscious procreative ones. We need to recognize this, but we don't need to embrace the appetitive.

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Yes immediate and proximate causations for our actions are often wildly different . This has parallels across all species .

A peacock my really feel that it has passion for dance this need to "express itself"( immediate causation )..but to an outside human observer all it is doing is attracting peahens ( ultimate causation)

I don't care about my freedom being attractive. I want a certain level of material comfort without answering to anyone or reporting to a cubicle. Some drives derive from mating impulses, yes, but many derive from hating bullshit. Period.

The point is that we all consciously have reasons like what you're saying: independence, hating bullshit etc. However, all are motivated by hardwired goals of species survival.

These base needs make us want to gain advantage in mating, but also in things like independence - which give us a higher likelihood of survival (i.e. controlling how to fulfill our base needs, reproduce, not be killed by others, etc.).

Your logic is tautologous. Evolution seeks no such things. Evolution just happens and is random. It's quite likely we have many traits which are not advantageous for survival, especially in our modern world. Appealing to evolutionary psychology is an intellectual and argumentative reductionist shortcut.

Evolution is not random - ask any biologist. Random mutations are actively selected for traits strongly favoring better species survival.

While certainly not a panecea, such strong drives as success, power, etc. that we're discussing are in no way accidental such as optical illusions and the like. To make an argument like this is to misunderstand evolution entirely.

> Evolution is not random - ask any biologist.

First you say this. Then you say this:

> Random mutations are [...]

See, you're arguing semantics. Yes, evolutionary pressures force natural selection, extracting order out of the fundamental randomness, but the mutations of evolution are random. My point is we don't know which pressures forced which particular traits, so to draw specific conclusions about modern behavior based on evolutionary psychology is more in the realm of speculation than actual science. It's all so much guessing and assumption.

No - it's not semantics. Mutations are random, the process selecting which move on is not. If you're picking tomatoes, some will be rotten at random, you select ones that look tasty - that's random rottenness and active selection. Try this out: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance/chance.html

Exactly. The reductionism is just too easy in these arguments with every behavior contorted to project onto a sexual / survival basis. There is no quarter given for things simply being what they are.

Very few things are what they are when it comes to how we work, because until very recently (compared to the total history of humans), the environment in which we lived was intensely competitive and brutal, and anything that didn't aid survival/propagation that required energy was strongly selected against over generations.

There are many things for which the evolutionary cause is not obvious to us, but it doesn't make sense that there would just be lots of random truly superfluous aspects to us.

> There are many things for which the evolutionary cause is not obvious to us, but it doesn't make sense that there would just be lots of random truly superfluous aspects to us.

Sure it does. Look at our appendix. Look at all the diseases out there--almost every person has at least one almost-certainly non-advantageous yet obvious ailment. One can speculate that it would be advantageous in scenario A or situation B, but that's all it is, is speculation. Maybe something we have now was advantageous 5000 years ago, but we don't necessarily know why, nor is it useful to describe modern behavior in such terms.

What is the species survival motivation of me enjoying Tolstoy, classic rock or scrabble? I'm sure you can come up with a retrofitted explanation to observation, but the point is you cannot reduce _every_ single human behavior and action to evolutionary impulses, at least not without a heavy amount of speculation. In many cases, we have to be honest enough to say we simply don't know.

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