The safety instinct complex likely has components shaped in pre-human and even pre-ape and perhaps even pre-mammal ancestors.
Pressure comes from duration as well as frequency of encounter. A feature encountered infrequently but consistently across many millions of years can exert a pressure equivalent to a feature encountered more consistently for a shorter period.
Also note that the effect size to be explained here is not that large - just a nudge towards relaxation in what seems to be a subpopulation of humans.
Sure, but this reasoning you are using could justifying saying just about anything we have encountered in human history, no matter how infrequent or minor, could have influence our evolution. It is incredibly hard to falsify such claims and easy to make them. I don't really know how to respond.
Yeah I personally don’t think such speculation should be treated as “science”, per se.
But, if the science minded shy away from such areas completely, they will be (and are) filled with explanations from people with completely unscientific worldviews and values.
The Dawkinsian selfish gene framing is unfalsifiable. Even Darwin is practically unfasifiable. It kind of comes with the territory.
I think the degree to which such an explanation is a just so story depends on how many aligning aspects we can observe in reality. An example in this case - the more a shower shifts from utilitarian to luxurious, the more it happens to resemble a hot spring. What would be the most luxurious shower? To me, natural stone walls in a natural looking pattern (impractical to clean), no obvious drain, instead the water drains into crevasses in rock (which is mimicked even in run of the mill shower designs), some natural light but not too much, etc.
> The Dawkinsian selfish gene framing is unfalsifiable.
Disagree. The whole thesis rests on genetic determinism, which was hypothesized early on - around the time the book was written - but discredited later.
> Even Darwin is practically unfasifiable. It kind of comes with the territory.
Which thesis in Darwin do you think is unfalsifiable? The null hypothesis of the time was that nature was created the way it is and variety was evidence of god's handiwork, and he proposed, argued and in my opinion convincingly established how a well structured system of rules could indeed lead to change and variety.
