The past explains the present

Abstract

Present conditions and selection pressures are irrelevant to the present design of organisms and do not explain how or why organisms behave adaptively, when they do. To whatever non-chance extent organisms are behaving adaptively, it is 1) because of the operation of underlying adaptations whose present design is the product of selection in the past, and 2) because present conditions resemble past conditions in those specific ways made developmentally and functionally important by the design of those adaptations. All adaptations evolved in response to the repeating elements of past environments, and their structure reflects in detail the recurrent structure of ancestral environments. Even planning mechanisms (such as “consciousness”), which supposedly deal with novel situations, depend on ancestrally shaped categorization processes and are therefore not free of the fast. In fact, the categorization of each new situation into evolutionarily repeating classes involves another kind of adaptation, the emotions, which match specialized modes of organismic operation to evolutionarily recurrent situations. The detailed statistical structure of these iterated systems of events is reflected in the detailed structure of the algorithms that govern emotional state. For this reason, the system of psychological adaptations that comprises each individual meets the present only as a version of the past.