Q&A: Does Evolution Have to Explain Everything?
Does Evolution Have to Explain Everything?
Question
According to evolutionary theory, can there be entities that are neither useful nor necessary for survival, yet on the other hand do not harm survival? In other words, does evolution claim that everything that exists is necessary for survival, or can there be things that have no evolutionary function and still exist (that is, are neutral in the evolutionary context)?
Answer
There is an advantage to organisms that do not contain unnecessary features, but there are complex processes of evolutionary drift and the like, through which unnecessary things arise, and in the end they either find some survival-related justification for themselves, or they simply have not died out yet.
Discussion on Answer
Possibly so. But as best I understand it, there is no advantage at all to beings with mental components. The survival advantages are behavioral in nature, and therefore everything could have been programmed through biology.
Can mental traits fail to fit survival considerations? I'm not sure. Even if the problem is mental, if in the bottom line the behavior is not survival-promoting, the organism will die out.
In your book you brought the argument that evolution does not need the mental at all, and from here it follows that its very existence is neutral and not necessary for survival. Can one say that most mental traits likely did serve one adaptation or another to evolutionary needs, or is this a closed system in which many traits may exist whose role is inherent to the mental essence itself, regardless of their survival/evolutionary necessity?