Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

hindsight seems surprising yet inevitable.)

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Gilbert has another favorite example: children. Although most people anticipate that having children will increase their net happiness, studies show that people with children are actually less happy on average than those without. Although the highs (“Daddy I wuv you”) may be spectacular, on a moment-by-moment basis, most of the time spent taking care of children is just plain work. “Objective” studies that ask people to rate how happy they are at random moments rank raising children — a task with clear adaptive advantage — somewhere between housework and television, well below sex and movies. Luckily, from the perspective of perpetuating the species, people tend to remember the intermittent high points better than the daily grind of diapers and chauffeur duty.

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The psychological use of the term is, of course, distinct from the evolutionary use. In psychology, adaptation refers to the process of becoming accustomed to something such that it becomes familiar; in evolution, it refers to a trait that is selected over the space of evolutionary time.

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The term cognitive dissonance has crossed over into popular culture, but its proper meaning hasn’t. People use it informally to refer to any situation that’s disturbing or unexpected. (“Dude, when he finds out we crashed his mother’s car, he’s going to be feeling some major cognitive dissonance.”) The original use of the term refers to something less obvious, but far more interesting: the tension we feel when we realize (however dimly) that two or more of our beliefs are in conflict.

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Another study, commissioned by a soap manufacturer, suggests that in the shower “men split their time daydreaming about sex (57 percent) and thinking about work (57 percent).” As Dave Barry put it on his blog, “This tells us two things: (1) Men lie to survey-takers. (2) Survey-takers do not always have a solid understanding of mathematics.”

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One recent NHTSA study suggests that fully 80 percent of fender-benders can be attributed to inattention. Among fatal car accidents, no firm numbers are available, but we know that about 40 percent are attributable to alcohol; among the remaining 60 percent involving sober drivers, inattention likely plays a major role.

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In an earlier era, there was “the inability to achieve vaginal orgasm,” “childhood masturbation disorder,” and drapetomania, the inexplicable desire on the part of some slaves to run away, or what I like to think of as freedom sickness.

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Another strand of evolutionary psychology emphasizes the extent to which current environments differ from those of our ancestors. As Kurt Vonnegut Ir. (who before he became a novelist studied anthropology) put it, “It’s obvious through the human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we do without vitamins or essential minerals.” “Human beings will be happier,” he wrote, “not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie, but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again.” I have great sympathy with this notion, but the stress of modern life is only a part of the story; as far as we can tell, mental disorders have been around for as long as humans have. Like virtually every aspect of mental life, mental illness depends on a mix of factors, some environmental, some biological.

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Although sociopathy would be unlikely to spread through an entire population, it is not implausible that in a society in which most people were cooperative and trusting, a small number of sociopaths might survive and even thrive. Then again, at least in contemporary society, a fair number of sociopaths ultimately get caught and wind up in prison, with no further chance to reproduce and little opportunity to take care of offspring they might already have.

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Evolution is also flagrantly unconcerned with the lives of those past child-bearing age; genes that predispose people to Huntington’s chorea or Alzheimer’s disease could bear some hidden benefit, but the disorder could persist even if it didn’t, simply because, as something that happens late in life, the bottom line of reproductive fitness isn’t affected.

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It is sometimes said, pejoratively, that evolution is “just a theory,” but this statement is true only in the technical sense of the word theory (that is, evolution is an explanation of data), not in the lay sense of being an idea about which there is reasonable doubt.