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First, does the fact that people smoke cigarettes falsify evolutionary
psychology? No! On the contrary, evolutionary psychology provides a
cogent explanation for the fact that people smoke even though it’s bad for
them: Cigarettes are an evolutionary novelty and there hasn’t been time to
evolve an aversion to them. Second, does the fact that people use
contraception falsify evolutionary psychology? No again! As Pinker points
out, had premodern environments “contained trees bearing birth-control
pills, we might have evolved to find them as terrifying as a venomous
spider.”
51 They didn’t, though, and therefore we don’t fear them at all. The
same basic argument applies to pornography, recreational drugs, and the
institutionalized adoption of non-relatives. Natural selection couldn’t
anticipate these novel stimuli and circumstances, and there hasn’t been time
for selection to carve out new adaptations to deal with them. Thus, all these
bewildering behaviors have the same root cause: Modern humans are a fish
out of water. We’re living anachronisms. And that’s why a lot of what we
do makes about as much adaptive sense as a hedgehog rolling into a ball in
the face of oncoming traffic.
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If an alien anthropologist had crashed in Europe in 1943, our intrepid
observer would surely have called us the “fierce” people. But if, say,
the landing site was Woodstock, New York, or San Francisco,
California, in 1968, ET would likely have labeled us the “erotic”
people. Local and historical context matters.
—Michael Shermer (2004),
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