Is human behavior just elaborate running and tumbling?

> Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order to pursue career goals?

The obvious explanation here is that there wasn't really birth control when humans lived as hunter-gatherers. You couldn't make that kind of sacrifice for the most part. There also weren't really careers in the modern day sense. Evolution hasn't had a chance to account for birth control yet. It's only been around for 60 years or so.

> Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel and extraterrestrials?

Because all life has some instinctive drive to explore and spread. By exploring, you have an opportunity to find new resources and territory, which is essential for survival or to outcompete other life.

> Why do some “gym rats” build their muscles well past the point of being a way to attract potential mates?

When humans lived as hunter-gatherers, there were no gyms and no muscle building magazines, no cult of bodybuilding. For the most part, you got as fit as you needed to be to hunt animals, to fight, and build whatever you needed to build.

However, I think the part about being "well past the point of being a way to attract potential mates?" is a value judgment. In actuality, growing a lot of muscle mass is a way of showing off your determination and fitness and standing out. Male bobybuilders probably have a much easier time attracting mates than the average joe.

> Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains despite the danger?

Evolutionary drive to explore. Evolutionary drive to show off prowess to attract mates and gain status. It's a high risk, high reward strategy.

"Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers" -- John Tooby and Leda Cosmides

This seems like an extraordinary claim. I can get behind the idea that it’s possible for a random mutation to impact personality traits. It is entirely different to turn to this as a general purpose mechanism for things that are hard to explain. It seems overwhelmingly likely that most traits are in some way selected for, because useful traits are naturally more likely to propagate than random useless (which will pass on, or not, at random)

It’s conveniently tautological because it’s impossible to prove or disprove without time travel :)

A more interesting conversation which is also impossible to prove/disprove is whether there is any behavior that isn’t just behavior/instinct. It sure feels like it with consciousness, but if humans are weights and biases, it was inevitable that I typed this :)

There is evolutionary fitness at an individual level, but cultures have evolutionary fitness as well. A culture might preserve individuals that have low individual fitness because they create cultural fitness.

For example the need to explore and expand the boundaries of knowledge may not be useful at an individual level, however a culture with those individuals might survive better than a culture without. All members of the culture that does not have those individuals may die, even if individuals are very fit.

Sociopathy is likely conserved at a cultural level because cultures periodically need sociopaths to completely obliterate competition or ruthlessly compete to survive.

Cultures also are constantly spawning mutations (civil rights, black lives matter, nazi ism, capitalism, democracy. social justice etc) those mutations can be positive, negative or neutral. Neutral traits can hang around if they carried alongside traits that do provide cultural fitness.

Past that point you just get whatever random sexual selection criteria emerge, and the ensuing feedback loops

Same reason the world is full of brightly colored loud-ass birds

e.g. i blast it at the gym (i dont actually but play along ;)) and i build an abstraction of life that that is part of. the fact that the abstraction has limitations is irrelevant. we dont process the real world we process our learned abstracctions of it.

Oddly compared to my cohort I am both a nerd and a jock. I find intense exercise be it hiking or cardio or weights helps me keep my sanity in terms of sitting all day and the other stresses of my work. It's not like it is abstractly good for my health in the long term and I'm discovering now that it probably wasn't but that I feel better immediately in the short term from physical exercise.

Human backs are maybe a good simple example of this: walking upright has been great overall, but has a lot of drawbacks that we suffer from such as difficult childbirth, back problems, etc. You could ask "what is the evolutionary advantage of lower back pain" and the answer of course is there's none, but there is still a broader explanation that makes sense when you consider the whole system.

To add to what you said, though, I don't think of these phenomena in terms of random mutations. In other words, I don't think of these people as anomalies that do anomalous things; moreso, I think of it as following our growth imperative (i.e. the expected reward gradient), which, if we follow it long and hard enough, can lead to behaviors that appear anomalous.

One commenter below (kortex) really hit on what is at least my interpretation when he said "we are basically seeing an implementation detail come to light."

The only way to get everything you'll ever want, is to want nothing.

> Why do some “gym rats” build their muscles well past the point of being a way to attract potential mates?

Margin of safety. Many would probably disagree with the author's assessment that they're well past that point.

> Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains despite the danger?

Conquering new land is deeply embedded into our psyches for evolutionary reasons. The species that's not afraid to do that will probably be more successful in the long run. Conquest of more land is generally correlated with better survival chances.

> Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order to pursue career goals?

Perhaps many, like myself, are aware of how expensive kids are but unaware of how difficult having kids gets later in life. So they optimize this wrong. I wish I had started earlier, but I put it off until later because I thought I'd be able to provide for them better. This thinking was correct, but having them earlier would still have been better, for me at least. The point is, it's certainly not due to a lack of evolutionary interest in having kids.

> Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel and extraterrestrials?

See conquest of land above...

Being a gym rat is not a heritable trait, but the ape who keeps doing whatever they were doing that made them strong and sexually desirable could be much more evolutionarily successful than the ape who stopped and became weak and undesirable. More generally, a positive feedback loop for beneficial behaviors is a desirable trait.

> Why are some people willing to free solo climb icy mountains despite the danger?

Being a free solo climber is not a heritable trait, but exploring your environment and incrementally pushing one's limits are both desirable traits. The ape that doesn't know which rocks he can climb falls to his death, the one who knows where to place their hands survives to reproduce.

> Why are some people willing to have fewer children in order to pursue career goals?

Corporate ladder climbing is not a heritable trait, but investing more resources in fewer offspring is advantageous when the odds of those offspring surviving are high. Even with no kids of your own, you pass on your genes through nieces, nephews, etc. The desire for resources has obvious evolutionary benefit.

> Why are most billionaire tech CEOs interested in space travel and extraterrestrials?

Neither being a tech billionaire nor being interested in space is a heritable trait, but the desire to explore is undoubtedly a desireable trait. The apes that expand into virgin territory can acquire more resources and become more resistant to local catastrophe than the apes who remain in one location. Elon Musk just has much better odds of becoming king of mars than I do. 500 years ago this may have manifested as building big ships instead of big rockets.

Of course random mutations happen, but those random mutations get eliminated quickly if they are harmful and spread quickly if they are helpful. Saying something is just due to random mutation is not only an unsatisfying answer, it is the answer to the wrong question: it doesn't matter why we started doing it, why do we still do it? Evolution doesn't create any trait, it merely perpetuates or fails to perpetuate them.

Not all behaviors are hardcoded into our DNA, certainly not at the level of specific actions we typically take day to day - my ancestors did not pass on their genes more successfully because of their affinity for arguing on the internet - but those traits which are heritable are unavoidably influenced by evolution. Evolution is the null hypothesis - if a system left to its own devices would do something without any external intervention, why invoke any additional explanation? It is those saying that something is genetic but which has somehow defied evolutionary pressure which are asserting a narrative, and who must show evidence in support of that narrative. Some narratives are legitimate, for example the traits of domesticated plants and animals aren't explained by natural selection; but oftentimes it is just "magnets, you can't explain that!"

Play is important for social cohesion.

Some traits might just present themselves as {seemingly nonsensical activity} in an industrialised world. Where back in time, these same people might have an advantage in {seemingly sensible activity}.

This does not preclude random traits being passed on, it is merely another way too look at things.

> and trying to find an evolutionary mating/survival/etc. narrative for each of them does not make sense

It is also a very lazy and uninteresting line of thought.

Of course {trait} had en evolutionary advantage. Why else would it be here? And if it is indeed random, then it may be of slightly more interest, but tells me very little.

We’re observing shadows cast against a wall. Eagerly pointing out this and that pattern. When the interesting part is knowing the individual shapes that make up the dancing display.

Essentially, if dopamine can be boiled down to a single lever, then I think that lever has as many buttons as a Formula 1 steering wheel.

There's actually 5 main subtypes of the dopamine receptor. They express in different concentrations in different brain regions, and have different functions.

DRD2 is kind of the heavy lifter when it comes to goal seeking. If you had to boil it down to one idea, I'd call it "go/no go". It might be tempting to try to map D2 to something like a coefficient, perhaps even the "run coefficient" in run and tumble. But it's not at all like that, even on its own. It's very nonlinear. Furthermore, the action of D1 modulates D2 in a concentration-dependent way. So you have not just D2 signaling, D1 signalling, but also the differential signal as well. We don't know exactly how it maps out, but we know it plays a roll in weighing risk/reward ratios. Screwing with this pathway often results in "low risk low reward" mild manner folks switching to "high risk high reward", often going into gambling, manic spending, hypersexuality, and grandiose thinking. This can be seen occasionally with e.g. Parkinson's drugs such as L-DOPA.

Actually my headcannon is there are some parallels between Parkinson's and control theory. Net loss of dopaminergic neurons results in lower bandwidth on your control loop. In PID loops, one of the symptoms of insufficient I/D gain is ringing, where the controller constantly hunts for the setpoint and overshoots. Tremor is a common symptom of Parkinson's (though it affects much more than just tremor), but if you notice, it's usually not a continuous tremor, it's only when trying to execute motor control, especially fine motor control. The body knows kinematically where it wants to be in space, but the feedback loop rings constantly as it isn't able to get sufficient bandwidth to error correct.

Anyway, I think the point of TFA is not to suggest that this loop is a single parameter, it's just to model it as such. It's a spherical cow reduction. That kind of reduction lets you build practicable theories and test hypotheses. Such as: if Parkinson's is the result of reduced bandwith, can we treat the symptoms by increasing dopamine gain? And in fact, we can, that checks out.

It sounded like it was still reinforcement learning, though.

This should be expected though, as neural net ML practices are a direct descendant of cybernetics, and are essentially an attempt to digitise natural adaptive control systems.

* you can reasonably analogise a single sensor/effector control loop as gradient descent against a 1d state.

The problem I have with their argument is a lot more philosophical: it all boils down to the validity of the reward hypothesis (http://incompleteideas.net/rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/RLAI/rewardhy...), and how we even define “intelligent” behavior. I’ve written another comment somewhere in this thread for more detail.

If you do make it that far, there is a payoff, though. This "trivial kind of system" isn't merely an analogy but the actual algorithm that we use, and the "implementation details" of this algorithm manifest in unintuitive ways that have a lot to say about how psychology is understood in general. Though, given your skepticism, more research will likely have to be done before this is satisfactorily proven to you.

This breakthrough (which I'd say is primarily K&A's breakthrough that I merely am speculating on top of), is actually a great example of theoretical progress. I typically consider myself an anti-reductionist, but this is a lesson in how studying simple systems (in this case, chemotaxis), can lead to better understanding of complex systems (because, well, it turns out at least in this case that these complex systems are actually the same simple systems at the top level—the complexity gets added in "layers" much like the evolution of brains).