The idea of evolution has been accepted in polite intellectual society for a long time now, but there's a been a further turn-of-the-screw in the mainstreaming of evolution over the past couple decades. It's a plug-and-play explanation of [everything.] You can bet good money that if you're reading a pop-psych article (or listening to a pop-psych podcast) eventually someone will say something like ('and the reason this problematic thing exists is because, on the savannah, it was adaptive to do x when a lion appeared, even if we no longer encounter lions')

Bracketing the truth of those claims, you can see how functionally this has become a stock rhetorical topos. It functions very similarly to the god-based teleological explanations of yesteryear. Why does x exist? Well, as someone in the fold speaking to another in the fold, one must first remember that the world was organized by God in such a way that each part supports every other part.

I want to make clear that I'm not trying to do something like "Atheism is its own faith." I'm trying to draw attention to the way in which evolutionary explanations function - independent of whether those claims are true. In their role as that kind of function, such explanations are subject to the the same tendencies that affect any species of the genus. They become more and more reflexive, automatic and unilluminating. Its something thats said, I think, less to illuminate the matter at hand than to reinforce the feeling of having a shared framework. The presumed audience already knows that the threat of a lion on the savannah lies behind everything, they've heard it many times before, so they're not really learning something new. They're being reassured that this thing too fits in the same framework, a respectable one.

I get frustrated by these explanations not because I don't believe evolutionary theory is more or less accurate - I do - but because they're casually deployed to explain everything. And that is the background I'm bringing to this:


Descartes, as we all know, asked: how do we know a demon isn't creating our experience and tricking us into thinking its real?

I think we can imagine (and we don't really have to, its out there) an evolutionary Descartes asking: How do we know that a blind evolutionary process isn't creating our experience, tricking us into thinking its real?

We don't really experience the Savannah, we experience an affordance-interface that allows us to most efficiently escape the lion.

Ok. And so we evolve from apes to proto-humans to humans, and live a while as hunter-gatherers. Then eventually, we create agricultural societies, and begin to evolve socially at a pace that greatly outstrips biological evolution. Eventually we create the scientific method, and eventually the theory of evolution.

But why, in principle, can't the plug-and-play evolutionary explanation fit here too?

I.e.

- It's adaptive to have evolutionary explanations. That's what those explanations are - adaptations that enable survival.

To which someone would respond:

- Well, no, in this case we have an exaption of capacities evolved for different purposes. We're able to re-direct rational thought for purposes other than their original function. There's no strict adaptive benefit to learning about evolution.

The response to which is:

-But how would you know? People experience the beliefs that keep them alive as true, even when they're not, even when they're simply heuristics that help them preserve their lives. How do you know this is true?

- Well, because of x
-But what if you only believe x because its adaptive?
-No x is true because of y
- But what if you only believe y because its adaptive?

and so forth.

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Now, certainly, the 'evolutionary Descartes' is behaving like, say, someone on a philosophy forum. He seems to lack the artful understanding that we, as real people 'thrown' into a world, use fluidly to move between language (cognitive, ethical, aesthetic) games. I personally wouldn't follow him all the way down his rabbit hole, to share in an empty, formal 'gotcha!' I'm a good later-Wittgensteinian here and I'd tsk him accordingly.

But! I think he is simply the inverse image of how easy evolutionary explanations are used in the wild today. You often see people invoke them without any robust explanation of the details - it's just a 'well the evolutionary explanation is certainly the most acceptable way to couch my point, so let me cobble together a few things quickly that sound plausible enough : dinner with your boss is like a lion.'

What's my point? Not sure. I think it's something like: a lot of psychological explanations are bad because, in taking for granted the instant acceptability of a gesture toward an evolutionary explanation, they too quickly find a conceptual resting point, and you get shallow insights (loose soil) that only appear to have depth because they invoke/hyperlink a worldview seen socially as impeachably sturdy bedrock.