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By Root 597 0

of groups that negotiate and bargain to create enduring organizations, and people who build cathedrals is nothing like what they think. It’s almost always just another case of blind variation and environmental filtering—where the variations are neural and the filtering is also neural. Alas, we don’t yet know enough about how thinking works to say more. We do know enough about Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell to see plainly that most inventing really is trial and error—blind variation and filtering out failures till the result is good enough. But it’s even blinder and less the result of intentional design than we realize.

Along with the human institutions people mistakenly think were the result of intentional design, important adaptations emerged from history without anyone intending, designing, or even recognizing them. This is especially true of long-standing, pervasive, and significant ones. Think of the British constitution, feudalism, or the Roman Catholic Church, three adaptations that were around for a long time without anyone supposing that they were designed.

Besides human adaptations, there are certain features of human life that are best thought of as symbionts or parasites, living on human life and changing it for the better or for the worse, but always adapting to ensure their own survival. For example, it’s difficult to think of tobacco smoking or heroin addiction as adaptations, because they are so harmful to humans. But they are practices that have persisted and spread throughout human history. They persisted and spread until their environments changed and their effects started to be selected against. Tobacco smoking and heroin addiction are not human adaptations; they are practices with adaptations of their own that enable them to exploit humans. They spread and persist for long periods while making people worse off and lowering their fitness. But it’s still a Darwinian process that carries them along.

Chinese foot binding is a clear example of how it works. Foot binding persisted for about 1,000 years in China. How it got started is unclear. But it caught on because women with bound feet were more attractive as wives. Bound feet were a signal of wealth, since only rich families could afford the luxury of preventing daughters from working. Girls with bound feet were also easier to keep track of and so likelier to be virgins. Thus, when the practice first arose, foot-bound girls had more suitors. Their fathers could get away with paying smaller dowries and would have more grandchildren. Pretty soon, every family that could afford it was binding their daughters’ feet to ensure they’d get married. In fact, everyone had to bind their daughters’ feet just to compete in the marriage market. The result? When every girl’s feet were bound, foot binding no longer provided an advantage to anyone in the marriage market. Moreover, all girls were worse off, less fit than their unbound ancestors because they couldn’t walk and suffered other health effects.

Foot binding started out as a new move in an arms race, a transitory adaptation for some girls and for some families. By the time it became really widespread and fixed, it was actually a physical maladaptation, reducing every foot-bound girl’s fitness. Once everyone was doing it, no one could get off the foot-binding merry-go-round. Not binding one’s daughters’ feet condemned them to spinsterhood. Here we have a tradition, a norm—“Bind daughters’ feet!” As a result of its widespread adoption, it ceased to be an adaptation for the people whose behavior it governed. Why did it persist despite its maladaptive effects on foot-bound girls? For whom or for what were its features adaptations? For itself, for the practice, for the norm, for the institution of foot binding. More exactly, foot binding had features that gave its early adopters advantages over others. Thus, it took hold. It’s early adoption made it more attractive (indeed exigent) for others. Thus, it spread. It’s wide adoption made it impossible for the adopters to stop. Thus, it persisted. Like any parasite,