Michael

“Just as it is too simple to say that people seek utility, it is too simple to say that people seek fitness. Instead, as we discuss next, human decision making is designed to achieve a set of very different evolutionary goals. In investigating how people meet these evolutionary goals, scientists have discovered something important: solutions to these different problems often require us to make decisions in different—and sometimes completely incompatible—ways. We are, in fact, inconsistent by design.”
― Anonymous

“Natural selection creates systems, like the brain, that are biased to minimize the costlier error. This built-in bias to avoid evolutionarily expensive errors is known as the smoke detector principle. Evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and Randy Nesse believe that natural selection engineered human judgment and decision making to be biased according to the same principle. Like a good smoke detector, our brain is rigged to sound the alarm even when there is no fire, forcing us to tolerate the inconvenience of false alarms to avoid potentially lethal misses. Because our evolutionary tendencies steer us toward avoiding costly errors, our decisions will result in more small errors. But we are disposed to produce little errors so that we avoid big mistakes.”
― Anonymous

“Why is learning to talk easy while learning to write is difficult? The answer lies in our evolutionary history. Our ancestors have been talking for hundreds of thousands of years. The ability to talk gave such an advantage that humans across the world have been naturally selected for being good talkers. Talking is like walking.”
― Anonymous

“Indeed, there is an emerging body of evidence to suggest that we are all modern cavemen, approaching the problems of our complex contemporary world using brains that evolved to confront ancestral problems.”
― Anonymous