“Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life.”
- Richard Dawkins – quoted from “The God Delusion”
“Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.”
- Steven Pinker
And they’re wrong. Their problem is that they forget we evolved an intellect that feels a need to examine the world and our place in it. So clearly preserving traits that tell us what is true about life help the species survive and truth is part of our fitness.
You can see that on a societal level, while western Europe developed this idea that reality has static elements that are always true, Asia developed an idea of a malleable world with constantly changing physical rules. When you grasp that reality is static you can have science and engineering, because you know that up is always up and down is always down and that the water will always push the wheel which turns the gears which turn the stones and grind the wheat. In a malleable reality you can’t have that. Which is why we jumped way past Asia in tech. Our evolved fitness for truth gave us the Industrial Revolution.