Living bodies are machines programmed by genes that have survived. The genes that have survived have done so in conditions that tended on average to characterize the environment of the species in the past. Therefore ‘estimates’ of costs and benefits are based on past ‘experience’, just as they are in human decision-making. However, experience in this case has the special meaning of gene experience or, more precisely, conditions of past gene survival. (Since genes also endow survival machines with the capacity to learn, some cost–benefit estimates could be said to be taken on the basis of
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