Don Boudreaux of Café Hayek posts about other evolutionary consequences of our original habitat:
In a recent e-mail he [Boudreaux’s friend – DB] suggested that some government intervention might be appropriate to reduce Americans’ consumption of fatty, non-nutritious foods. He pointed out (correctly) that we are genetically evolved to eat a lot of fatty foods when such foods are available. This genetic disposition served us well in our evolutionary past when food was seldom abundant. But because in the industrialized west today food is always abundant, our genes propel many of us to eat in ways that threaten our long-term health prospects -- that is, to overeat and become obese.
Then went on, tongue in cheek:
After all, the theory of natural selection says that men are evolved to maximize the number of sexual partners each enjoys. Such a preference for multiple partners made sense in our evolutionary past. But in today's bourgeois world, where stable families (the data show!) provide greater economic prospects for their members than do broken families, we must crack down on pre-marital sex, adultery, and divorce.
This is not exactly correct – it is an example of a conflict between evolutionary pressures on the individual, and evolutionary pressures on the tribe. Stable families are clearly to the evolutionary benefit of the tribe – they maximize the number of offspring per woman, however a particular (male) individual may find it advantageous to maximize the number of his offspring without regard to their care – the reproductive strategy used by insects and fish.
It is for this reason that almost all traditional societies have evolved institutions to encourage the stability of families – those tribes that didn’t have them were less successful and didn’t persist.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at April 28, 2004 11:25 PM