[jayajay]

"Why does X happen?" is not a useful question. We can ask "How does X happen?". Consider the reframing "What is the correlation between me getting angry and other abstract things happening around me when someone is eating an apple?" used by psychologists and data scientists. Maybe this can provide you with a more practical answer. Maybe you are upset that they are eating and not sharing, or that they are eating and you are not, etc. Neuroscientists would be interested in what the brain is doing when something like this happens, e.g. the inter-region dynamics of getting angry in response to seeing/hearing others eat. It is not a boring question, at all. But I see your point, most people are interested in a practical answer, not in brain dynamics.

[jamesrcole]

> "Why does X happen?" is not a useful question

"Why" is the cornerstone of evolutionary biology, in the sense of why was this feature adaptive (at least in our evolutionary past, if not any more). It can give you a deeper understanding of something

[jayajay]

Evolution is a nice framework but, like Hund's rules, it warrants further investigation; it answers "what happened" but not "how it happened". Heuristics are pseudo-solutions and don't necessarily conduce a deep understanding. I guess I should have said "asking 'why?' is eventually useless".