Thinking Beyond Science

All human behavior owes its existence to psychological mechanisms in conjunction with environmental inputs to those mechanisms. Psychological mechanisms, at some fundamental level, owe their existence to evolution by natural and sexual selection. Consequently, all fields that deal with human behavior will become more deeply illuminated by understanding underlying evolved psychological adaptations.

Humans possess a ravenous consummatory appetite. Most individuals will typically make hundreds of consumption-related decisions in any given day. Should I have breakfast or skip straight to lunch? What am I going to wear today? Will it be casual attire or a power suit? Should I put on my favorite perfume or try the new one that an old acquaintance recently gave me? For dinner, will I have a healthy and sensible tuna salad or head off to the deli for a thick pastrami sandwich?

We consume traditional products (e.g., food and clothes) and services (e.g., massage at the spa); a wide range of relationships, including those with family members and friends (via gift giving) as well as mates (via an act of courtship); cultural products such as movies, song lyrics, religious narratives, literature, art, dance, celebrity gossip magazines, advertising, and television shows; and hedonic experiences (traveling), to name but a few.

Consumption acts can be mapped onto one of four Darwinian overriding pursuits, namely, survival (preference for the fatty smoked meat), reproduction (offering flowers as part of an elaborate courtship ritual), kin selection (buying a gift for my nephew), and reciprocity (organizing the bachelor party).

Consumers engage in behaviors that are either homologous or analogous to those displayed by other animals. A homology refers to similarities between species that are indicative of a common ancestry. Homologies include DNA sequences, anatomical structures, morphological traits, physiological systems, and behavioral patterns.

An analogous trait between two species is an example of convergent evolution; namely, the fact that two species evolved the same adaptation as a result of having faced similar selection pressures. In other words, in such instances, the biological analogy does not imply shared ancestry. Rather, it connotes the fact that natural selection, the Darwinian process by which organisms evolve adaptations, can yield the same solution when animals originating from different lineages share a common selection environment.

Pregnancy sickness is a universal physiological phenomenon. Irrespective of cultural setting or epoch, women have experienced its unpleasant symptoms in similar ways. Evolutionists have concluded that pregnancy sickness is an adaptive solution to a woman’s possible exposure to food pathogens during a crucial part of the gestational period known as organogenesis. Hence, whereas proximate-informed physicians happily prescribe drugs to assuage the symptoms of pregnancy sickness, evolutionists recognize that such symptoms are beneficial to women and their fetuses.

Our epigenome (not to be confused with our genome) is a blueprint by which genes are activated or silenced. This demonstrates how absurd the biological determinism argument is. Genes interact with the environment in part via our epigenome in yielding unique individuals who are products of both nature and nurture. This explains why identical twins, who otherwise share the same genes, can end up with such radically different health outcomes.

Humans have evolved gustatory preferences for fatty foods. Accordingly, companies (e.g., McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King) create innumerable products that cater to this biological-based preference, subsequent to which marketers and advertisers seek ways to ensure that we’ll choose their hamburger the next time we are hungry. That our genetic and biological heritage guides our consummatory nature in no way renders the existence of marketers as useless and their quest as futile.

In a much smaller number of species, males provide the greater parental investment (e.g., cassowaries), so the theory would predict that the sexual dimorphisms (i.e., the pattern of observable differences between the sexes) would be perfectly reversed. This is exactly borne out by the data.

Source – The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature by Gad Saad

Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11034732-the-consuming-instinct