| > applying intention to evolution is a bad habit I think it boils down to the directionality of time. let me explain applying intention to evolution does mean re-imagining what may have happened, but I put that it's an extremely natural thing to do. when I reimagine some historical sequence of events as if it had intention I am making it easier to remember for me. but this is only realistic in retrospective. this whole argument is also applicable to conpiranoic thinking. what one does in a conspiracy mindset is exactly to attribute agency and intention into events; this is very easily done in retrospect, when we know what the outcome actually was. doing this for future events is difficult and always comes with a risk of guessing wrong (this is why I say this has got to do with time-directionality: looking backwards into the past in contrast with guessing the future) but does this even mean that historical people (the participants of the historical events) knew what would happen in the end? maybe or maybe not. that is not the point. I'm saying that projecting non-existing agency into historical evens is a memorization technique this all becomes really funky whenever anybody assumes the memorization technique (what I say/do to remember) is the same thing as that which I'm actually remembering |
unique to evolution though, this habit assumes that everything is beneficial for navigating the environment aside from just reproduction, or the most beneficial compared to unimagined alternatives that died out and simply can't be observed. it ignores other population ending factors despite that line of population having more beneficial traits to today's environment.
the only "evolved because" answer to evolution is "some mutant reproduced", and reality is even more crass than that given how that mutant reproduced a lot