The Past Explains the Present

Abstract

Abstract Present conditions and selection pressures are irrelevant to the present design of organisms; they do not explain how or why organisms behave adaptively, when they do. To whatever non-chance extent organisms are behaving adaptively, it is (1) because of the operation of underlying adaptations whose present design is the product of selection in the past, and (2) because present conditions resemble past conditions in those specific ways made developmentally and functionally important by the design of those adaptations. All adaptations evolved in response to the repeating elements of past environments, so their design reflects the recurrent properties of those environments. Emotions are adaptations that treat the present as a version of the past. They categorize new situations as instances of evolutionarily recurrent events that posed adaptive problems with large fitness consequences. When activated, an emotion coordinates suites of cognitive and physiological adaptations, in ways well-designed for solving those ancestral problems.