Imagine if you will someone who just grates on you. I personally don’t have to look far. There’s a guy who works in my community garden and he went on a tirade about “foreigners” the other day, and as I listened to him rant I was thinking, “why the hell are you like this?”
Then I stopped and thought about that question, because he is theoretically the highly refined product of millions of years of evolution. At each generation the pair of individuals that went together to form his line were theoretically fitter than at least the bulk of all those that died out. Even controlling for a whole bunch of accidental suboptimal pairings he should still be a fairly lean mean surviving machine.
So why does he have this tendency toward overgeneralization and narrow-mindedness? How do these characteristics serve to keep him alive and breeding? They’d sure not be encouraging me to propagate his line if I had the equipment to do so. Hell, at times I’m encouraged to hit him over the head with a box of pansies and end his branch of his family tree right there in the garden.
