Right, it’s not a dichotomy—the two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. But it’s still an extremely relevant distinction—at least for those of us who are interested in the organisms themselves, rather than solely in the unconscious, abstract optimization process that created them.
Sure, I get the point. Humans are products of natural selection, so anything any human does can be seen as the result of selection pressures favoring behaviors that resulted in increased fitness in the EEA. There is some sense of the words in which you could look at someone who is, say, committing suicide (before having reproduced), and say: “What she’s really doing here is attempting to maximize her expected inclusive fitness!”
It’s not wrong so much as it is silly. The point of the post is that the organisms themselves don’t actually care about fitness. You can give a fitness-based account of why the organisms want what they actually do want. But so what? When we’re not talking about evolutionary biology, why should we care? You might as well say (I’m inspired here by a Daniel Dennett quote which I can’t locate at the moment) that no organism really maximizes expected fitness; they actually just follow the laws of physics. Well … okay, sure, but it’s silly to say so. You have to use the right level of explanation for the right situation.
Right, it’s not a dichotomy—the two explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. But it’s still an extremely relevant distinction—at least for those of us who are interested in the organisms themselves, rather than solely in the unconscious, abstract optimization process that created them.
Sure, I get the point. Humans are products of natural selection, so anything any human does can be seen as the result of selection pressures favoring behaviors that resulted in increased fitness in the EEA. There is some sense of the words in which you could look at someone who is, say, committing suicide (before having reproduced), and say: “What she’s really doing here is attempting to maximize her expected inclusive fitness!”
It’s not wrong so much as it is silly. The point of the post is that the organisms themselves don’t actually care about fitness. You can give a fitness-based account of why the organisms want what they actually do want. But so what? When we’re not talking about evolutionary biology, why should we care? You might as well say (I’m inspired here by a Daniel Dennett quote which I can’t locate at the moment) that no organism really maximizes expected fitness; they actually just follow the laws of physics. Well … okay, sure, but it’s silly to say so. You have to use the right level of explanation for the right situation.