Yeah the idea that these things can be explained simply by a purposeful guiding force like evolution is an attractive idea not unlike the belief in a higher pow

Yeah the idea that these things can be explained simply by a purposeful guiding force like evolution is an attractive idea not unlike the belief in a higher power. What seems more likely is that many human traits and behaviors are highly complex evolutionary cruft — things accumulated over millions of years that fall into a few categories: 1) evolved "recently" to create a specific advantage for a human population (the author's favored explanation for crying) 2) provided an advantage for a distant ancestral species and stuck around long past the context in which they were advantageous (the human appendix) 3) random interaction between different traits or behaviors initially evolved from 1&2 4) random evolved trait that happened to be part of an evolutionarily successful population (Epicanthic fold) 5) random interaction between evolved traits or behaviors and a novel environment to produce novel behavior (over-eating and obesity caused by an evolutionary preference for high-caloric foods and their now-widespread availability) I tend to not like the speculative aspects of evopsych like the ones in this post because they don't really account for the amount of randomness, complex interaction, and vestigial weirdness that seems to result from evolution.