I think that I wrote that comment a bit late at night and was thinking about evolutionary psychology, so I'll offer an apology to the evolutionary biologists in

I think that I wrote that comment a bit late at night and was thinking about evolutionary psychology, so I'll offer an apology to the evolutionary biologists in the audience. Sorry. :/ The majority of evolutionary biology is good hard science. The knowledge we gain from studying historical trajectories through genome-space has immense real-world value. As a concrete example, inspecting historical speciation events allows us to tighten the bounds we have on various constants in the dynamics that govern genetic change when implemented using Earth-pattern biochemistry (CGAT DNA etc), and that knowledge in turn helps us reduce bias and disentangle causes from correlations when we're trying to nail down genetic causes of disease. There is a segment of evolutionary biology which is... not such good science. This is where you get attempts to explain specific high-level features of biology or human behavior using equally specific features in historical environments. Things like "Women are better at seeing colors because it was their job to look for fruit when we were hunter-gatherers." Works in this domain, if they pretend to have an underlying theory at all, will offer something vague and nonspecific that reveals no bigger picture or more general principle, or will offer an underlying theory that totally fails to generalize. Falsifiable hypotheses or useful predictions can be few and far between. You can't use it to reduce error in any experiment nor to improve the efficiency of any tool or product. It is, in short, bullshit. I put my comment above closer to the bullshit end of the spectrum basically because I took some inappropriate shortcuts, I think because I was trying to not be bored or boring. Most of the issue was that I anthropomorphized evolution to assign intent and by attempted to present a "why" that implies that any alternatives were considered or chosen between. That kind of thinking, in the context of evolutionary biology, is playing with fire. I'll hand an explanation of that off to an essay that I think can explain it better than I possibly could: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-g...