Quoted By:
>Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers.
— John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture.
Fifty thousand years ago, the taste buds of Homo sapiens directed their bearers to the scarcest, most critical food resources—sugar and fat. Calories, in a word. Today, the context of a taste bud's function has changed, but the taste buds themselves have not. Calories, far from being scarce (in First World countries), are actively harmful. Micronutrients that were reliably abundant in leaves and nuts are absent from bread, but our taste buds don't complain. A scoop of ice cream is a superstimulus, containing more sugar, fat, and salt than anything in the ancestral environment.
No human being with the deliberate goal of maximizing their alleles' inclusive genetic fitness, would ever eat a cookie unless they were starving. But individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.
A toaster, though its designer intended it to make toast, does not bear within it the intelligence of the designer—it won't automatically redesign and reshape itself if you try to cram in an entire loaf of bread. A Phillips-head screwdriver won't reconform itself to a flat-head screw. We created these tools, but they exist independently of us, and they continue independently of us.
