For Young, the Shock of Old Age Spurs Saving

Wall Street Journal
March 25, 2011

Young people typically don't care about saving for their retirement, since it feels so far away. A Stanford project seeks to close this gap by showing people how they'll look when they are old. WSJ's Jason Zweig explains.

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People can exercise only so much self-control

USA Today
March 22, 2011

People who overtax their self-control may find they have less in reserve for later, suggests an intriguing new study that may have implications for people trying to lose weight or make other behavioral changes.

But lack of sleep does not appear to affect self-control, say the researchers, whose study of 58 subjects is in the March issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The subjects — half had stayed awake for 24 hours and half were well-rested — were shown scenes involving vomit and excrement from two movies, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983) and Trainspotting (1996).

Some were allowed to express reactions; others were told to show no emotion. Later, they played an aggressive game in which they won or lost by chance. Winners were allowed to blast their opponent with a loud noise.

Those who had suppressed their emotions blasted their opponent at a noise level about 33% higher than those who were allowed to show emotion, regardless of how much sleep they'd had, researchers found.

Results suggest that "people have a diminishable supply of energy that the body and mind use to engage in self-control," says study author Kathleen Vohs, a consumer psychology professor at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "When people use this energy toward achieving one goal, they have less of it available to use toward achieving other goals."

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Read the Paper

[ungated]

Is Happiness Overrated?

by Shirley S. Wang

Wall Street Journal
March 15, 2011

The relentless pursuit of happiness may be doing us more harm than good.

Some researchers say happiness as people usually think of it—the experience of pleasure or positive feelings—is far less important to physical health than the type of well-being that comes from engaging in meaningful activity. Researchers refer to this latter state as "eudaimonic well-being."

Happiness research, a field known as "positive psychology," is exploding. Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness.

In fact, in some cases, too much focus on feeling happy can actually lead to feeling less happy, researchers say.

The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one's sports team—a feeling called "hedonic well-being"—tends to be short-term and fleeting. Raising children, volunteering or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be, particularly in the long run.

"Sometimes things that really matter most are not conducive to short-term happiness," says Carol Ryff, a professor and director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"Eudaimonia" is a Greek word associated with Aristotle and often mistranslated as "happiness"—which has contributed to misunderstandings about what happiness is. Some experts say Aristotle meant "well-being" when he wrote that humans can attain eudaimonia by fulfilling their potential. Today, the goal of understanding happiness and well-being, beyond philosophical interest, is part of a broad inquiry into aging and why some people avoid early death and disease. Psychologists investigating eudaimonic versus hedonic types of happiness over the past five to 10 years have looked at each type's unique effects on physical and psychological health.

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Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds

New York Times
January 10, 2011

Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more.

Yes, you knew there had to be a catch. As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism.

A principal author of the new take on oxytocin is Carsten K. W. De Dreu, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. Reading the growing literature on the warm and cuddly effects of oxytocin, he decided on evolutionary principles that no one who placed unbounded trust in others could survive. Thus there must be limits on oxytocin’s ability to induce trust, he assumed, and he set out to define them.

In a report published last year in Science, based on experiments in which subjects distributed money, he and colleagues showed that doses of oxytocin made people more likely to favor the in-group at the expense of an out-group. With a new set of experiments in Tuesday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he has extended his study to ethnic attitudes, using Muslims and Germans as the out-groups for his subjects, Dutch college students.

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See the papers (1 and 2)

Marek Kaminski. "Games Prisoners Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison"

On March 11, 1985, a van was pulled over in Warsaw for a routine traffic check that turned out to be anything but routine. Inside was Marek Kaminski, a Warsaw University student who also ran an underground press for Solidarity. The police discovered illegal books in the vehicle, and in a matter of hours five secret police escorted Kaminski to jail. A sociology and mathematics major one day, Kaminski was the next a political prisoner trying to adjust to a bizarre and dangerous new world. This remarkable book represents his attempts to understand that world.

As a coping strategy until he won his freedom half a year later by faking serious illness, Kaminski took clandestine notes on prison subculture. Much later, he discovered the key to unlocking that culture--game theory. Prison first appeared an irrational world of unpredictable violence and arbitrary codes of conduct. But as Kaminski shows in riveting detail, prisoners, to survive and prosper, have to master strategic decision-making. A clever move can shorten a sentence; a bad decision can lead to rape, beating, or social isolation. Much of the confusion in interpreting prison behavior, he argues, arises from a failure to understand that inmates are driven not by pathological emotion but by predictable and rational calculations.

Kaminski presents unsparing accounts of initiation rituals, secret codes, caste structures, prison sex, self-injuries, and of the humor that makes this brutal world more bearable. This is a work of unusual power, originality, and eloquence, with implications for understanding human behavior far beyond the walls of one Polish prison.

Marek M. Kaminski is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. Between 1982 and 1989 he managed Solidarity's underground publishing house STOP.

Written with refreshing directness--funny and horrible by turns--and complemented by delightful illustrations, Games Prisoners Play . . . makes a highly original contribution to the literature on prisons. The book will also prove valuable for introducing game theory. . . . There could be no better advertisement for rational choice.

Michael Biggs, American Journal of Sociology

Games Prisoners Play is not just a superb description of prison life but also a provocative analysis of why the choices prisoners make under difficult circumstances are rational. The lens through which Kaminski views these choices is elementary game theory, which he uses to elucidate the subtleties of different strategic situations in a highly imaginative way. This book ranks with only a handful of works I know of that apply game theory, in depth, to unusual subjects and end up enriching both the subject and the theory.

Steven J. Brams, New York University, author of Theory of Moves
and coauthor of Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution

An exceptionally interesting book, and a very engaging read, Games Prisoners Play is bound to make a major impact on scholarship in the field. I would be very surprised if it did not become a staple reference for any study of prison life for years to come.

Diego Gambetta, author of The Sicilian Mafia

A terrific achievement. Marek Kaminski combines a unique 'fieldwork' in Polish prisons with insightful models of prisoners' behavior. This is an exceptional contribution to the ethnography of prison life and an imaginative application of game theory. It is also a memoir in its own right.

Federico Varese, author of The Russian Mafia

Evolutionary Psychology and the Antimarket Bias

by Toban Wiebe

Mises Daily
September 15, 2010

Economic illiteracy is widespread, but why should this be a problem? Ignorance is even more pervasive in microelectronics and computer programming, and yet computer technology is nothing short of astounding.

In most fields of study, people leave science to experts and trust the correctness of their conclusions. Not so for economics: rather than leaving the matter to economists, people hold strong positions that are plainly false. Economic ignorance by itself is not the problem. As Murray Rothbard put it,

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

If people trusted economic theory to professional economists, their economic ignorance would be as harmless as their ignorance of most other subjects.

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Models tell us more than hindsight

by Tim Harford

Financial Times
September 11, 2010

According to my esteemed colleague Gideon Rachman, economists should be swept off their thrones by historians. Economists have had far too strong a stranglehold on the levers of power, he claims. They think they are scientists. They think they can foretell the future. They are wrong: “pseudo-scientists”, “peddling brash certainties”. Historians such as Gideon and Professor Niall Ferguson, hitherto relegated to backwaters such as the FT’s op-ed page, should at last be paid a bit of attention.

In pondering how to respond, I suffered an acute shortage of brash certainty. Gideon is quite right about the importance of history. When it comes to economics, however, the chief source of brash certainties appears to be Gideon, who wouldn’t know an economic model if it paraded down a catwalk at him.

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Montgomery County schools posting calorie counts in cafeterias

Washington Post
September 6, 2010

Brianna Lattanzio wound her way through the bustling cafeteria line at her Silver Spring middle school one recent morning, weighing her options. Nutritional information was listed for each of the choices: an Asian-inspired chicken and rice dish (352 calories), vegetarian "chik'n" nuggets (190 calories), a steak-and-cheese sub (420 calories) and macaroni and cheese (481 calories).

The Sligo Middle School student opted for the macaroni. Brianna said that she picked the dish because it looked the best but that she appreciated having the calorie information.

"I pretty much wrote a letter last year saying that they should have more soups and salad," she said. "I think if they could try to lower the calories, that would be good."

This school year, all Montgomery County schools began posting nutrition information in cafeterias to help their young calorie-counters and encourage healthier choices. They also did it to comply with a new county law that requires food outlets with more than 20 locations to post calorie information for items served.

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Paranoid About Paranoia

by Ross Douthat

New York Times
September 5, 2010

Last Wednesday, a man named James Lee entered the headquarters of the Discovery Channel with explosives strapped to his body, took three hostages at gunpoint, and waited for his demands to be met.

A foe of population growth, Lee had apparently decided that shows like “Kate Plus Eight” and “19 Kids and Counting” were pushing the planet toward destruction. “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants,” he decreed, before moving on to demand solutions for “global warming, automotive pollution, international trade ... and the whole blasted human economy.”

By the end of the day, the hostages were safe, Lee had been killed by police, and TLC’s fall lineup was preserved. But the debate about the hostage-taker’s politics was just beginning.

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What I Believe (about Markets and Morals): A Reply to Jerry Coyne & My Critics

by Michael Shermer

Huffington Post
August 31, 2010

In his endearingly titled blog, "Michael, we hardly knew ye," the venerable evolutionary biologist and slayer of creationist dragons Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution is True) wonders if I've gone 'round the bend over capitalism and sold my skeptical soul to the Templeton Foundation, the alleged evil subsidizers of religious and capitalist propaganda. Allow me to set the record straight (again) for all my critics out there (and in reading the comments to Jerry's blog there's more than I thought, and many of them are darned right caustic!).

First, on the Templeton Foundation, I was invited to write a monthly column for their new magazine, Big Questions Online, and as with my work for them in years past, I'm allowed to write just about anything I like. It is interesting that Jerry and his commentators would hone in on this, my second column, ignoring my first column, which was a stinging rebuke of religion in general and Deepak Chopra's New Age spirituality in particular. No one could possibly read my list comparing God 1.0 to God 2.0 (omnipresent--nonlocal; fully man/fully God--wave/particle duality; miracle--wave function collapse, etc.) and conclude that I'm the pay of a religious propaganda machine. And if that doesn't seal the deal for ya, the God critique was originally my second column, but the BQO editors liked it so much that they bumped it up to number 1, and it was, in fact, the most popular article on the site for the entire month. So there!

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Evolution, Ethics, and the Market

by Michael Shermer

Big Questions
August 27, 2010

Given the economic roller-coaster ride of the past two years, the idea that capitalism promotes morality might seem like an oxymoron. The imperfections of the market system, the wild swings of the boom-and-bust cycle, and the "animal spirits" of irrational investors have revealed the gulf between economic theory and financial reality — and have put the advocates of capitalism on the defensive.

But let's not get carried away. As every economist knows, the market system, based on the free exchange of goods, is the greatest prosperity-generating machine ever invented. Nor are markets just a necessary evil that we must regretfully tolerate. To the contrary, trade itself leads directly and measurably to greater virtue — to higher levels of generosity, fairness, and trust. But don't take my word for it. There is plenty of experimental evidence to back me up, and it points to the deep evolutionary foundations of the market's moral effects.

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Freakonomics Movie Trailer Released!

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Stone Age Minds - A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

Reason TV
August 5, 2010

Based at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are two pioneers and leading lights in the field of evolutionary psychology. This multidisciplinary approach seeks to develop a better understanding of human nature by taking seriously the idea that our brains evolved to solve a variety of adaptive problems routinely faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

While our "stone age minds" have programs that are very good at things like detecting lies, attracting mates and avoiding predators, they are in many ways ill equipped for the kind of complex market-based society that we live in today. The lens of evolutionary psychology, for example, provides insights into why so many people in industrialized countries are overweight and sympathetic to socialist ideas.

Reason.tv's Paul Feine sat down with Cosmides and Tooby to learn more about evolutionary psychology, the history of the field, and the implications for our society.

Approximately 10 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine; shot by Alex Manning and Hawk Jensen; edited by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.

For an extended version of this interview, go here.

Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science

From uttering a prayer before boarding a plane, to exploring past lives through hypnosis, has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture? Robert Park, the best-selling author of Voodoo Science, argues that it has. In Superstition, Park asks why people persist in superstitious convictions long after science has shown them to be ill-founded. He takes on supernatural beliefs from religion and the afterlife to New Age spiritualism and faith-based medical claims. He examines recent controversies and concludes that science is the only way we have of understanding the world.

Park sides with the forces of reason in a world of continuing and, he fears, increasing superstition. Chapter by chapter, he explains how people too easily mistake pseudoscience for science. He discusses parapsychology, homeopathy, and acupuncture; he questions the existence of souls, the foundations of intelligent design, and the power of prayer; he asks for evidence of reincarnation and astral projections; and he challenges the idea of heaven. Throughout, he demonstrates how people's blind faith, and their confidence in suspect phenomena and remedies, are manipulated for political ends. Park shows that science prevails when people stop fooling themselves.

Compelling and precise, Superstition takes no hostages in its quest to provoke. In shedding light on some very sensitive--and Park would say scientifically dubious--issues, the book is sure to spark discussion and controversy.

Economics Behaving Badly

by George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel

New York Times
July 14, 2010

It seems that every week a new book or major newspaper article appears showing that irrational decision-making helped cause the housing bubble or the rise in health care costs.

Such insights draw on behavioral economics, an increasingly popular field that incorporates elements from psychology to explain why people make seemingly irrational decisions, at least according to traditional economic theory and its emphasis on rational choice. Behavioral economics helps to explain why, for example, people under-save for retirement, why they eat too much and exercise too little and why they buy energy-inefficient light bulbs and appliances. And, by understanding the causes of these problems, behavioral economics has spawned a number of creative interventions to deal with them.

But the field has its limits. As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics.

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The Limits of the Coded World

by William Egginton

New York Times
July 25, 2010

In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys were not deliberating, but rather reacting to visual stimuli, researchers were able to plausibly claim that the computer could successfully predict the monkeys’ reaction. In other words, the computer was reading the monkeys’ minds and knew before they did what their decision would be.

The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will decide before they themselves know it, what is left of the notion of human freedom? How can we say that humans are free in any meaningful way if others can know what their decisions will be before they themselves make them?

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Your Move: The Maze of Free Will

by Galen Strawson

New York Times
July 22, 2010

You arrive at a bakery. It’s the evening of a national holiday. You want to buy a cake with your last 10 dollars to round off the preparations you’ve already made. There’s only one thing left in the store — a 10-dollar cake.

On the steps of the store, someone is shaking an Oxfam tin. You stop, and it seems quite clear to you — it surely is quite clear to you — that it is entirely up to you what you do next. You are — it seems — truly, radically, ultimately free to choose what to do, in such a way that you will be ultimately morally responsible for whatever you do choose. Fact: you can put the money in the tin, or you can go in and buy the cake. You’re not only completely, radically free to choose in this situation. You’re not free not to choose (that’s how it feels). You’re “condemned to freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. You’re fully and explicitly conscious of what the options are and you can’t escape that consciousness. You can’t somehow slip out of it.

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Journal of Economic Perspectives

The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) attempts to fill a gap between the general interest press and most other academic economics journals. The journal aims to publish articles that will serve several goals: to synthesize and integrate lessons learned from active lines of economic research; to provide economic analysis of public policy issues; to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas among the fields of thinking; to offer readers an accessible source for state-of-the-art economic thinking; to suggest directions for future research; to provide insights and readings for classroom use; and to address issues relating to the economics profession. Articles appearing in the journal are normally solicited by the editors and associate editors. Proposals for topics and authors should be directed to the journal office.

Online issues of the Journal of Economic Perspectives published since 1999 are now publicly accessible at no charge, compliments of the American Economic Association.

Leave the Gamblers Alone: Why can't adults be left to do what we want to do?

For self-responsible adults, writes John Stossel, gambling can be fun and harmless. A free country is supposed to treat adults as though we are self-responsible. Government should let us learn from our mistakes rather than treat us like children.

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Η Εξελικτική Ψυχολογία (απάντηση στον Homo Sapiens Socrates)

Σωκράτη οι παρατηρήσεις σου είναι πολύ εύστοχες και μάλιστα τέτοιου είδους αντιρρήσεις αποτελούν εν μέρει και την κύρια κριτική απέναντι στην ΕΨ που συνήθως προέρχεται από άσχετα μ’αυτήν επιστημονικά πεδία. Θα προσπαθήσω εδώ να δώσω μια σύντομη απάντηση σ’αυτήν την κριτική και μάλλον θα τη συμπεριλάβουμε μαζί με τις υπόλοιπες και στις σημειώσεις.

Κατ’ αρχήν σύμφωνα με την αρχή της διαψευσιμότητας του Karl Popper μια θεωρία για να θεωρηθεί επιστημονική θα πρέπει να σου δίνει τη δυνατότητα να την διαψεύσεις για τον απλό λόγο ότι για να αποδείξεις την αλήθεια μιας υπόθεσης σε όλες τις περιπτώσες απαιτείται ένας άπειρος αριθμός δεδομένων – πράγμα αδύνατον – ενώ για να τη διαψεύσεις αρκούν συνήθως έστω και λίγες περιπτώσεις (βεβαίως και η διάψευση είναι πολύπλοκη υπόθεση γιατί για να είναι επιστημονική δεν αρκεί ένα μεμονωμένο αρνητικό αποτέλεσμα αλλά συγκέντρωση στοιχείων, σύγκριση, ορθός έλεγχος και επιστημονική μεθοδολογία).

Η ΕΨ όπως και κάθε άλλη σοβαρή θεωρία ψυχολογίας σαφώς και ενέχει αυτήν τη διαψευσιμότητα στις υποθέσεις της. Kάτι που της δίνει επιπλέον αυτό το πλεονέκτημα σε σχέση με άλλες κοινωνικές επιστήμες και δεν απαιτεί κανενός είδους «διανοητικό άλμα» είναι η δυνατότητα διεξαγωγής πειραμάτων και συλλογής εμπειρικών δεδομένων τόσο στο εργαστήριο όσο και εκτός αυτού.

Ας δούμε όμως ένα παράδειγμα. Όπως έχουμε πει, ένα από τα σημαντικότερα προσαρμοστικά ζητήματα που έπρεπε να αντιμετωπίσει ο εγκέφαλος των προγόνων μας ήταν η επιλογή συντρόφου (mate selection) γιατί με αυτήν διασφαλίζεται η αναπαραγωγή και η διάδοση των γονιδίων στις επόμενες γενιές. Ως εδώ αυτή η θεωρία είναι αρκετά ευλογοφανής. Από αυτήν προκύπτει λογικά μια υπόθεση που κάνει η ΕΨ για την επιλογή συντρόφου. Οι γυναίκες ως πιο ευάλωτες για πολύ μεγάλο διάστημα (καθώς διέθεταν μετρημένα ωάρια, έπρεπε να κυοφορήσουν πολλούς μήνες, να θρέψουν και να φροντίσουν το παιδί για αρκετά χρόνια μέχρι να μπορεί να τα καταφέρει μόνο του) προτιμούσαν άντρες που θα μπορούσαν να διασφαλίσουν πόρους (τροφή και ασφάλεια) σ’αυτές και το παιδί. Με αυτές τις προτεραιότητες οι γυναίκες εξασφάλιζαν την διάδοση των γονιδίων τους. Οι άντρες, από την άλλη μεριά, που ενδιαφέρονταν ως πρώτη προτεραιότητα να αναπαράγουν καλά γονίδια σε υγιείς και ικανούς απογόνους, ήταν λογικό να προτιμούν υγιείς, νέες και καλοφτιαγμένες γυναίκες (γιατί αυτά τα χαρακτηριστικά αποτελούν άμεσους σηματοδότες υγείας). Και οι δυο στρατηγικές φαίνεται να πετυχαίνουν αποτελεσματικά την επιβίωση του είδους μέσω της αναπαραγωγής.

Η ΕΨ λοιπόν υποθέτει ότι ο εγκέφαλος των δυο φύλων ανέπτυξε μέσω της φυσικής επιλογής αντίστοιχα modules που μας καθοδηγούν εως και σήμερα ως έναν βαθμό στην επιλογή συντρόφου. Συγκεκριμένα το μοντέλο που προτείνει είναι ότι οι γυναίκες έχουν μια προτίμηση σε μεγαλύτερους άντρες γιατί αυτό σηματοδοτεί στις κοινωνίες μας ένα άτομο αποκατεστημένο και ώριμο που μπορεί να παράσχει πόρους στην οικογένειά του, ενώ οι άντρες προτιμούν νεότερες και όμορφες γυναίκες. Αυτό το μοντέλο έχει πράγματι επιβεβαιωθεί με μια πληθώρα εμπειρικών δεδομένων (ενδεικτικά μόνον βλ. τις έρευνες του D.M. Buss αλλά και την πολύ πρόσφατη έρευνα στα οικονομικά που ανέφερε ο κ. Χατζής στο μάθημα) κι έχει αντέξει στο τεστ του χρόνου (και του Popper). Ή με άλλα λόγια, όσοι έχουν προσπαθήσει να το ελέγξουν δεν έχουν καταφέρει ως τώρα να το διαψεύσουν.

Όπως παρατηρούμε, λοιπόν, από την αρχή – δηλαδή τη σύλληψη της θεωρίας και την παραγωγή των υποθέσεων – εως το τέλος – τη συγκέντρωση και τον έλεγχο των δεδομένων – η ΕΨ έδειξε ότι έχει όλα τα χαρακτηριστικά μιας σοβαρής επιστήμης. Μάλιστα η ΕΨ «ξεπερνάει» σε επιστημονικότητα παρα πολλές άλλες ψυχολογικές θεωρίες που πολλοί τις θεωρούν δεδομένες. Επειδή όμως η ΕΨ είναι μια νέα επιστήμη, αρκετές υποθέσεις που κάνει δεν έχουν υποβληθεί ακόμη σε αρκετά τεστ διαψευσιμότητας από εμπειρικά δεδομένα κι έτσι φυσιολογικά υπάρχει ακόμη κάποιος σκεπτικισμός.

Μια άλλη διάκριση που πρέπει να γίνει επίσης και πολύ σύντομα είναι η εξής: ενώ τα πάντα επάνω μας είναι προϊόν της εξέλιξης με την έννοια ότι μας συνόδευσαν εως σήμερα, αυτό δεν σημαίνει απαραίτητα ότι είχαν κάποτε surviving value. Όπως έχει αναφερθεί και σε προηγούμενη διάλεξη, υπάρχουν διάφορα χαρακτηριστικά που δεν φαίνονται να έχουν ή να είχαν κανέναν εξελικτικό σκοπό, από τις θηλές στους άντρες εως την καλλιτεχνική έκφραση. Άρα μπορεί να έχουμε κάτι : (α) γιατί μας ήταν απαραίτητο για την επιβίωση, (β) γιατί απλώς την εξυπηρετούσε, (γ) γιατί δεν την εμπόδιζε ή (δ) γιατί ενώ την εμπόδιζε είχαμε και κάτι άλλο που το αντιστάθμιζε (βλ. ουρά παγωνιού). Με τα εργαλεία που διαθέτει η ΕΨ μπορεί και πρέπει να κάνει αυτές τις διακρίσεις και να καταλήγει σε ασφαλή συμπεράσματα πριν αποφανθεί ποιόν από τους παραπάνω ρόλους διαδραματίζει κάποιο χαρακτηριστικό ή κάποια ιδιότητα.

Από την άλλη, εμείς, στο συγκεκριμένο σεμινάριο, δεν κάνουμε ΕΨ, ούτε έχουμε τη δυνατότητα να ελέγχουμε εκείνη την ώρα πειραματικά όλες τις υποθέσεις που μπορεί να συζητηθούν. Για διδακτικούς σκοπούς χρησιμοποιούμε τη λογική της ΕΨ για να κάνουμε κατανοητά τα εργαλεία της και τη σπουδαιότητά της. Πρέπει όμως να επισημάνουμε ότι οι υποθέσεις που έχουν ειπωθεί κατα καιρούς δεν είναι σενάρια επιστημονικής φαντασίας, αλλά υπαρκτά και σοβαρά μοντέλα, που ελέγχονται από τους ειδικούς και υπάρχουν στη βιβλιογραφία, όπως η προτίμηση για ενεργειακές τροφές και διάφορα άλλα.