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By Root 1036 0

this excess heat as a pure by-product, advantageous, since the excess heat of internal combustion engines normally requires a cooling mechanism, in most cases a water pump and radiator. So is the cooling system, then, a by-product of the engine? Not exactly. The cooling system is a feature intrinsic to the design of combustion engines: it functions to disperse excess heat, and reverse-engineering understanding of it would see it as part of whole functionally interconnected mechanism. It is as much an intrinsic part of the design of the engine as, for instance, the heating and cooling systems of the human body. These involve life-protecting homeostatic reactions such as perspiration, shivering, and fevers. They are intrinsic elements of the body’s physiological system and not by-products adaptation—spandrels or epiphenomena. Like the body, internal combustion engines could not function at all without specialized cooling systems: on the engine analogy, cooling systems are adaptations.

Let us push the analogy a step farther. Suppose water used to cool a car engine is diverted into a second, smaller radiator with a fan in order heat the driver/passenger compartment. Are we now justified at least calling the car heater a by-product of the system? The answer again rather than being an extraneous epiphenomenon, the heater is entirely calculated way of using what really is a by-product (excess heat) for the benefit of the driver, satisfying his desire to stay warm. The mobility human beings want from cars and the desire for warmth in any event neither parts nor design features nor by-products of engine: they explain rather the very existence of the car, with its engine heater. The car heater, like any designed artifact that makes use depends on a by-product, does not itself necessarily become for that reason a by-product. That engines give off heat is an inconve nient contingent fact, which in this case human ingenuity turns into an asset. (If engines gave off light instead of heat, engineers might well figure how to make productive use of the excess light, and devise alternative methods to heat cars in cold weather.) It is true that people do not and manufacture cars in order to create car heaters, but that is saying that evolution did not produce eyes in order to produce eyelids. Eyelids are an adaptation too (a further, man-made enhancement of would be spectacles). When the parts of a whole mechanism— are interrelated and what they accomplish.

Grasping such functional interrelationships requires more than sorting features into the two categories of adaptation and by-product. It’s matter of grasping a range of bedrock adaptations—but then, on top by-products of adaptations, utilizations, enhancements, and extensions of adaptations, combinations of enhancements of adaptations, and on. In this sense, Darwinian explanation is always looking back into past to adaptations that come to us from the ancestral environment, then also toward the effects of history and culture on how evolved adaptations, strictly conceived, are modified, extended, or ingeniously enhanced—or even repressed—in human life. In mentioning the fact internal combustion engines might have given off light as a byproduct instead of heat, I meant to emphasize the contingency of both adaptations and their by-products: this as a matter of fact is how turned out—beings who take plea sure in cheesecake and Chopin. We might have turned out differently if conditions had been slightly altered the ancestral environment.

This contingency—a dependence on historical accidents we never fully know and prehistoric conditions about which we can speculate imperfectly—makes the whole field of Darwinian psychology dependent not only on a general command of evolutionary theory on close empirical observation of the human mind and its adaptive features today—especially as viewed cross-culturally. Putting all these factors together, along with such knowledge as we have of hunter-gatherer groups that survived into the modern age, is how we can achieve best possible understanding of the