Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

flf homosexuality is a sort of evolutionary byproduct, rather than a direct product of natural selection, does that make it wrong to be gay? Not at all; the morality of sexuality should depend on consent, not evolutionary origin. Race is biological, religion is not, but we protect both. By the same token, I see pedophilia as immoral — not because it is not procreative but simply because one party in the equation is not mature enough to genuinely give consent; likewise, of course, for bestiality.

again we have a system that hasn't been tuned precisely enough: it's one thing to get a kick from learning which herbs help cure open wounds, but another to get a kick from learning the latest on Angelina and Brad. We would probably all be better off if we were choosier about what information we sought, א la Sherlock Holmes, who notoriously didn't even know that the earth revolved around the sun. His theory, which we could perhaps learn from, goes like this:

A man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.. . It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Alas, Sherlock Holmes is only fictional. Few people in the real world have information-gathering systems as disciplined or as finely tuned as his. Instead, for most of us, just about any information can drive our pleasure meters. Late at night, if I allow myself access to the Internet, I'm liable to click here (World War II), click there (Iwo Jima), and then mindlessly follow another link (Clint Eastwood), only to stumble on a fourth (Dirty Harry), rapidly chaining my way from topic to topic, with no clear destination in mind. Yet each tidbit brings me pleasure. I'm not a history scholar, I'm not a film critic; its unlikely that any of this information will ever come in handy. But I can't help it; I just like trivia, and my brain isn't wired precisely enough to make me more discriminating. Want to stop my web surfing? Go ahead, make my day.

Something similar happens in our eternal quest for control. Study after study has shown that a sense of control makes people feel happy. One classic study, for example, put people in a position of listening to a series of sudden and unpredictable noises, played at excruciatingly random intervals. Some subjects were led to believe that they could do something about it — press a button to stop the noise — but others were told that they were powerless. The empowered subjects were less stressed and more happy — even though they hardly ever actually pressed the button. (Elevator "door close" buttons work on a similar principle.) Again, there would be adaptive sense in a narrowly focused system: organisms that sought out environments in which they had a measure of control would outcompete those that left themselves entirely at the mercy of stronger forces. (Better, for example, to wade in a slowly moving stream than a full-on waterfall.) But in modern life, we trick the machinery that rewards us for a sense of accomplishment, spending hours and hours perfecting golf swings or learning how to create a perfect piece of pottery — without discernibly increasing the number or quality of our offspring.