EvolutionaryExplanation

Quora Answer : What's the evolutionary explanation for why some people think everything has an evolutionary explanation?

Sep 17, 2013

Not everything has an evolutionary explanation. It's a fairly vulgar idea of evolution to think that everything that exists in modern-life must be explained by it.

Of course, evolution put a constraint on it, just as gravity does. But we gravitationists don't spend our time wondering what the gravitational explanation for, say, Switzerland, is. Even if we believe that, ultimately, if gravity had worked differently, the Switzerland we know today wouldn't exist. Still, that's not the kind of explanation that would matter to anyone.

Similarly, I don't think there's any kind of interesting evolutionary explanation of steam engines. Sure, if we'd evolved differently we'd have no capacity to invent or use steam-engines. But so what? That doesn't mean we were adapted FOR steam-engine invention. Or that evolutionary theory has anything useful to say about them. The explanation is about the history of the ideas that went in to them, ideas that many kinds of general intelligences could have discovered.

I'm inclined to think evolutionary theory itself is like steam-engines. Not something worth looking for an evolutionary explanation for.

Your examples are, of course, much less abstract and closer to our bodily / animal natures and so maybe evolution has more to say, though personally I think the more abstract cases are borderline. I'm not sure that there are really any interesting evolutionary explanations of music. I think that's veering towards the gravitational explanations of Switzerland thinking.