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So for something to have an evolutionary effect (whether positive or negative), it must affect mating rates? I'm trying to clarify what the definition is here,

So for something to have an evolutionary effect (whether positive or negative), it must affect mating rates? I'm trying to clarify what the definition is here, because I seemed to have made a habit of rationalizing every aspect of human behavior with an evolutionary explanation (is this a known fallacy, btw?). E.g., feeling sad is evolutionarily useful because it teaches you to avoid things that cause you to be sad, and encourages you to seek out behavior to dispel the sadness, e.g. socializing, which seems evolutionary useful. You can do this with pretty much any emotion. Is that the wrong way to look at it?

efficax 9y ago
The biggest danger in evolutionary thinking is "just-so" rationalization of the present state of things where we take the way things are and assume they are the way they are because they were evolutionarily efficient, and then construct a story that explains why some particular trait is particularly adaptive. Once you dive into the weirdness of biology and the madness of evo-devo, one of the first things that strikes you is how weird biology is and how many strange compromises bodies make as a consequence of selective pressures, and how many "spandrels" or side-effects there are. Boredom might be a spandrel, a decorative side-effect, of intelligence, which is probably the chief evolutionary advantage of human beings. Anyway, the wrong thing to do is to take some trait and reason back based on the assumption that it was evolutionarily adaptive. That's basically evidence-free speculation. Or fiction.