What evolution never promised us
Evolution did not promise to make us happy, healthy or capable of understanding reality correctly. It did not promise anything at all.
Natural selection has no plan and no final destination. It preserves traits that helped organisms survive and reproduce in particular environments. A trait does not have to produce happiness or long-term health. It only has to provide an advantage large enough to be passed on.
Richard Dawkins emphasises that evolution is not simply a process of pure chance:
“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”
Mutations do not appear because an organism needs them. But once differences exist, environmental pressures make some variants more likely to survive and reproduce than others. The result may look designed, although no one planned it.
The unsettling consequence is that something can be natural without being good for us.
Our attraction to sugar and fat developed in environments where calories were difficult to obtain. Anxiety protected ancestors who reacted quickly to uncertain dangers, even if many of those dangers turned out not to be real. Sensitivity to rejection was useful when exclusion from a small group could threaten survival.
These mechanisms did not disappear when our environment changed. Supermarkets now offer unlimited calories to bodies shaped by scarcity. Social media exposes brains adapted to small communities to a continuous stream of comparison, approval and rejection. Stress systems built to respond to temporary physical threats can remain active because of deadlines, bills and notifications.
This conflict is known as evolutionary mismatch: a trait that was useful in an earlier environment may become ineffective or harmful in a radically different one.
Evolution can explain why we experience particular desires, fears and biases. It cannot tell us that we should obey them. “Natural” does not mean healthy, moral or desirable.
Nature gave us adaptations—not instructions for a good life.
Source: Richard Dawkins — The Blind Watchmaker
— Richard Dawkins