We have no instinctive revulsion of condoms or oral sex. Our brains, those supreme reproductive organs, don’t perform a check for reproductive efficacy before granting us sexual pleasure.
If we could barely arrange to have enough sex to cause 2 pregnancies per lifetime, then we would have a revulsion of condoms, oral sex, etc.
If for example we spent almost all of each year alone, and once a year men and women would meet on a sandy beach (or just offshore) and have sex, and that would be the only chance for women to get +regnant until the next year, men would compete intensely for the women who seem to be fertile, and the losers and the apparently-infertile women could console each other. When you only get one chance you don’t waste it.
But humans use sex for social signalling. A man who publicly explained that he intended never to have sex except when he was trying to cause a pregnancy, might find himself at a disadvantage among some women.
But human brains clearly can imagine these links in protein. So when the Evolution Fairy made humans, why did It bother with any motivation except inclusive genetic fitness?
How are we supposed to tell? Like, we need food for energy and for building materials. When you don’t get enough energy you feel that. When you don’t get enough of some building material you feel that too, and you might learn to recognise that particular feeling. I’ve read about africans who specificly get hungry for meat, who identify the specific feeling of protein deficiency. How many others are there? Each individual amino acid? Each individual vitamin? I think instead you get rewarded by the feeling you get when there’s enough of everything and no glut of something that causes problems. And it’s up to your behavioral reinforcement system to notice foods that give you that feeling.
So humans love the taste of sugar and fat, and we love our sons and daughters. We seek social status, and sex. We sing and dance and play. We learn for the love of learning.
There maybe wasn’t much chance to overdose on sugar or far in the old days. Or salt, if you were inland. Give it a few more generations and we might do that sort of thing less. Are Pima amerindians more susceptible to the amount of sugar we eat, or do they eat more because they can? I expect that’s been tested but I don’t know the answer myself. Maybe they haven’t been exposed to sugar for as long, so they don’t have the defenses against it we do.
You can learn strategies to play chess. Wouldn’t it be nice if evolution had provided us with a chess-fitness optimiser? Instead of thinking about strategies, you just make the right move. But that requires the problem of winning at chess to be already solved.
It might very well turn out that in our future people who successfully reproduce will tend to be people who want to, and who figure out how to. There’s some of that now, asnd maybe those people wind up with fitter children than the ones who become parents through carelessness. That might be hard to measure just now. Maybe the big majority of the children come from parents who give little thought to how they’ll take care of their children, and the ones who’re cautious wind up under-reproducing as a result. In the long run the evolutionary process will note what’s worked whether we manage to measure it or not.
We have no instinctive revulsion of condoms or oral sex. Our brains, those supreme reproductive organs, don’t perform a check for reproductive efficacy before granting us sexual pleasure.
If we could barely arrange to have enough sex to cause 2 pregnancies per lifetime, then we would have a revulsion of condoms, oral sex, etc.
If for example we spent almost all of each year alone, and once a year men and women would meet on a sandy beach (or just offshore) and have sex, and that would be the only chance for women to get +regnant until the next year, men would compete intensely for the women who seem to be fertile, and the losers and the apparently-infertile women could console each other. When you only get one chance you don’t waste it.
But humans use sex for social signalling. A man who publicly explained that he intended never to have sex except when he was trying to cause a pregnancy, might find himself at a disadvantage among some women.
But human brains clearly can imagine these links in protein. So when the Evolution Fairy made humans, why did It bother with any motivation except inclusive genetic fitness?
How are we supposed to tell? Like, we need food for energy and for building materials. When you don’t get enough energy you feel that. When you don’t get enough of some building material you feel that too, and you might learn to recognise that particular feeling. I’ve read about africans who specificly get hungry for meat, who identify the specific feeling of protein deficiency. How many others are there? Each individual amino acid? Each individual vitamin? I think instead you get rewarded by the feeling you get when there’s enough of everything and no glut of something that causes problems. And it’s up to your behavioral reinforcement system to notice foods that give you that feeling.
So humans love the taste of sugar and fat, and we love our sons and daughters. We seek social status, and sex. We sing and dance and play. We learn for the love of learning.
There maybe wasn’t much chance to overdose on sugar or far in the old days. Or salt, if you were inland. Give it a few more generations and we might do that sort of thing less. Are Pima amerindians more susceptible to the amount of sugar we eat, or do they eat more because they can? I expect that’s been tested but I don’t know the answer myself. Maybe they haven’t been exposed to sugar for as long, so they don’t have the defenses against it we do.
You can learn strategies to play chess. Wouldn’t it be nice if evolution had provided us with a chess-fitness optimiser? Instead of thinking about strategies, you just make the right move. But that requires the problem of winning at chess to be already solved.
It might very well turn out that in our future people who successfully reproduce will tend to be people who want to, and who figure out how to. There’s some of that now, asnd maybe those people wind up with fitter children than the ones who become parents through carelessness. That might be hard to measure just now. Maybe the big majority of the children come from parents who give little thought to how they’ll take care of their children, and the ones who’re cautious wind up under-reproducing as a result. In the long run the evolutionary process will note what’s worked whether we manage to measure it or not.