For example, in humans it’s theorized that women with wider hips have a better chance of a successful birth, therefore men are more attracted to wide hips. Like how can my brain know that wide hips is a good genetic trait and pass this attraction to wide hips to my offspring?
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That’s not how evolution works.
Example of how it works:
Currently, scientists have learned that deer are starting to migrate out of known areas of foraging and into deeper forests during established Deer Hunting Seasons.
This happened because ‘some’ deer randomly chose to migrate into deeper forests at the start of hunting season. Purely by chance. Those deer stood a much better chance of surviving Hunting Season than those deer that did not migrate. So, they bred more often and had new deer who grew up with the same migration patterns. Eventually, that sort of migration pattern is widespread across the deer population.
Evolution is about passing on traits that better enable survival.
Because being attracted to beneficial traits means that your offspring are more likely to have those same traits, which in turn propagates both the trait and the attraction towards it.
Run that circle for a few hundred thousand years, and you’re going to end up with instinctive grooves which tend to favor “healthy” appearance.
Turn it around the other way: Organisms which *weren’t* more attracted to traits which improve survival…were less likely to have surviving children.
Fast forward a few million years of this, and all of the surviving organisms are the descendants of the ones which *were* attracted to features that improved survival….because they had improved likelihood of surviving.
Evolution doesn’t work on knowledge. Males that just happened to randomly have an attraction towards women with wide hips had more descendants. Way back when this was only starting to occur, attraction to wide hips was probably just like any other random paraphilia or kink people had and still have.
They aren’t… look at peacocks. There is no advantage to carrying around such a massive hinderance, only reason it even exists is that the female peacocks go wild for it and if their taste changed then it would slowly disappear.
How come all of the people still at a party at 5am are really into partying?
The others left earlier.
It’s an observational bias – when you look around, you’re seeing all of the organisms that, after billions of years, are still around. Hanging around is tough and so only those whose motivations line up with it are going to manage the feat.
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