for sugar was adaptive for a hunter-gatherer even though it leads to obesity and
heart disease today; sickness and food cravings in pregnancy may have protected
a foetus from poisons then, although well-fed women need different kinds of pro-
tection now; and superior spatial ability in males may have been adaptive when
males were predominantly hunters and females were gatherers, even though we
all have to get around vast buildings and cities today.
Second, evolutionary psychology emphasises the difference between the repli-
cation strategies of genes, and human strategies for gaining pleasure or success.
As Pinker puts it,
almost everyone misunderstands the theory. Contrary to popular belief,
the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all
human striving is to spread our genes. [. . .] People don’t selfishly spread
their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they
build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children,
the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation,
with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved.
(1997, pp. 43–44)
In other words, we like good food and crave sex because people with those
desires would, in the past, have been more successful at passing on their genes.
One of the results of our evolved nature is morality. Although genes are selfish,
we are not – at least not always. Morality and consciousness have long been
interlinked (Frith and Metzinger, 2016). Indeed, the words ‘consciousness’ and
‘conscience’ both come from the same Latin root conscire (con-, with, and scire,
to know), via conscius (meaning having common knowledge with another) and
conscientia (meaning moral conscience). This makes sense in that shared under-
standing underlies our ability both to understand ourselves and to empathise
with others and so to care about them (Chapter 10). But does consciousness, in
FIGURE 11.1 • In the Swiss Army knife caricature of the mind there is a special tool for every essential task. But how many
modules are there? How much do they interact, and how specialised do they have to be? Is consciousness just
one more blade on the knife?
