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March 7, 2020
Our hunch, in short, is that truer perceptions are fitter perceptions. Evolution weeds out untrue perceptions. That is why our perceptions are windows on objective reality. These hunches are wrong. On the contrary, our perceptions of snakes and apples, and even of space and time, do not reveal objective reality. The problem is not that our perceptions are wrong about this or that detail. It’s that the very language of objects in space and time is simply the wrong language to describe objective reality. This is not a hunch. It is a theorem of evolution by natural selection that wallops our
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That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring.
Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.
The FBT Theorem tells us that the language of our perceptions—including space, time, shape, hue, saturation, brightness, texture, taste, sound, smell, and motion—cannot describe reality as it is when no one looks. It’s not simply that this or that perception is wrong. It’s that none of our perceptions, being couched in this language, could possibly be right.
Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report fitness payoffs and to correct errors in these reports.
our rich world of light and color is a welcome gift, compliments of four kinds of photoreceptors in the eye. But Arabidopsis thaliana, a small weed that looks like wild mustard, has eleven kinds of photoreceptors.4 The lowly cyanobacterium, which has colonized the earth for at least two billion years, boasts twenty-seven.
John Tyndall that, “The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable.”
confabulates,
Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness? Perhaps we don’t need more data. Perhaps what we need is a mutation that lets us understand the data we have.
the reality prompting you to create your experience of a tomato is nothing like what you see and taste.
we can prove that if our perceptions were shaped by natural selection then they almost surely evolved to hide reality.
Reproductive success depends on collecting fitness points. Beauty tells us what and where they are.
The predictions of evolution about beauty are surprising but, as we will see in chapter nine, its predictions about physical objects are disconcerting: objects, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder and inform us about fitness—not about objective reality.
beauty is the intelligent verdict of a complex but mostly unconscious computation.
Each time you encounter a person, your senses automatically inspect dozens, perhaps hundreds, of telltale clues—all in a fraction of a second. These clues, meticulously selected through eons of evolution, inform you about one thing: reproductive potential.
if genes get beauty wrong, they tend to go extinct.
Your computation of beauty, in a recursive twist, can enhance your own fitness if you compute beauty better than your competition does.
The computation of beauty is wired into us early in life. Infants as young as two months of age look longer at faces that adults rate more attractive.
One trifle in the search for beauty is a feature of the human eye called the limbal ring, a dark annulus at the border between the colored iris and the white sclera.
For limbal rings to be prominent they must be visible, and, for that, the cornea—the transparent outer layer of the eye—must be clear and healthy.
A medley of diseases can obscure the limbal rings; someone with distinct rings is less likely to suffer them.
the thickness of limbal rings, and hence their prominence, declines with age.
In principle, then, limbal rings signal youth, health, and thus fitness.
Machiavellian genes nab fitness points, not as honest wages, but as filthy lucre.
from birth to age fifty, there is a decline in the area of the iris relative to the white sclera; but from age fifty on, this area of the iris increases, as tissues around the eyes sag and cover the sclera.
larger irises, and fertility, correlate with youth in females under fifty.
A woman at twenty-five may be more fertile than she was at twenty, but her reproductive value was greater at twenty.
So we expect that natural selection has shaped men to find women most beautiful at about twenty. This leads to a clean prediction: men over twenty should prefer younger women; men under twenty should prefer older women.
Both predictions have been confirmed in experiments.
Japanese anime and manga cartoons, seeking to accentuate youth, depicted female characters with large irises long before our research.
In mammals, the female must invest heavily, in gestation and nursing. The male, however, may invest heavily, providing food and protection, or minimally, by simply mating and leaving.
The greater your investment, the fussier your choice of mate.17 If each mating is costly, then you will choose judiciously: genes that code for rash choices are less likely to survive into the next generation. If, however, your investment is small, then another strategy is available: be less picky and have multiple mates. Genes that adopt this strategy of quantity over quality can still perpetuate themselves across generations, even if each offspring has less chance to survive.
The sex with greater investment is pickier in choosing mates. The one with less investment is less choosy and compe...
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This explains why, typically, men court and women choose.
A woman who mates with a man of resources and commitment will more likely succeed in raising kids. So selection shaped women to prefer men with resources and with status, which correlates with resources. This preference crosses cultures and intensifies in women who have more resources. It is no side effect of financial inequality.
A woman can tell, from a photo of a face, if a man is prone to cheat and divert resources to other women; cheaters tend to look more masculine, but not more attractive.
selection shaped women to prefer men with more masculine faces. But there is a wrinkle: higher testosterone is correlated with less investment in offspring and a greater tendency to cheat.
But genes don’t stop at masculine faces. They choreograph a woman’s preference for masculine gaits, bodies, odors, voices, and personalities.
Women in the low fertility phase feel more commitment to their partner, but during the high fertility phase they are more prone to cheat, to fantasize about cheating, to dress attractively, and to meet and flirt with new men.
the pupils of a woman will, when her fertility is high, dilate more to a sexually arousing image
On each trial, she showed them two photos of a woman’s face that were identical, except that one had larger irises and smaller pupils. This forced a man to choose between a “younger” woman showing less interest and an “older” woman showing more. Different men took different strategies: some chose the younger face, others the face showing interest.
Some women are attracted to “bad boys,” men who are “fickle, frivolous, opportunistic, hardheaded, handsome, confident and conceited.”39 These women prefer larger pupils in the eyes of men.
The white sclera of the human eye advertises gaze direction, making it a tool for social communication.
It also advertises emotion and health.
Whitening the sclera makes a face more attractive.
Because men prefer youth in women, and women prefer slightly older men, I predicted that men, more than women, prefer bluer scleras in the opposite sex.
Our eyes, being moist, also sparkle with highlights, which enhance their attraction.
Filmmakers avoid highlights in the eyes of villains, making them lifeless and nefarious.
The eyes of animals on land sparkle with highlights because the index of refraction of light in air differs from its index in the film of tears on the eyes.
natural selection permits a strategy to survive if it confers a benefit of fitness to a relative that is greater than its cost of fitness to you.
