If your tribe is faced with a resource squeeze, you could try hopping everywhere on one leg, or chewing off your own toes. These “solutions” obviously wouldn’t work and would incur large costs, as you can see upon examination—but in fact your brain is too efficient to waste time considering such poor solutions; it doesn’t generate them in the first place. Your brain, in its search for high-ranking solutions, flies directly to parts of the solution space like “Everyone in the tribe gets together, and agrees to have no more than one child per couple until the resource squeeze is past.”
