{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026956727358713645, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0028375502482856467, 'mean_word_length': 5.11271676300578, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Why can we ask why?: Our adaptability adaptation programs us not to be programmed

Charles Darwin developed his theory of evolution to account for adaptation, or how species manage their way through life. He sought a mechanical explanation of life’s diversity that did not require an external global agency such as a theological Creator. His deep insight was that natural selection is such a mechanism. Darwin’s basic imagery, which persists today, was of competing individuals, each constructed somewhat differently by their inheritance in ways that affect their ability to survive and reproduce in their particular local ecological setting. Victory goes to the swift or the swaggerer and extinction greets the hindmost. Darwin didn’t know about genes but, as we say today, the resulting adaptation is the revised genomic program that determines the victor’s success. All competitors, of course, are playing the same game, a game without end because circumstances keep changing. There’s no limit to the new variation that mutation and recombination can produce. In our information age, we routinely use the metaphor of computer programs to account for this, viewing the genome as the geneby-gene instructions for building an organism’s traits from embryonic scratch. Selection purges instructions that don’t succeed in their local circumstances, leaving those that do. Too often we don’t think beyond textbookish genetic mechanisms for adaptations and their evolution, ideas that are satisfyingly melodramatic, and easy to model mathematically. We tend to think in terms of conveniently simple scenarios: A rabbit escapes the fox to munch another day if it has a genetic mutation leading to faster muscle contraction; the joys of coupling go to those whose genotype produces the most enticing pheromone. Such one-for-one scenarios treat genes as independent “selfish” causal agents. They provide a convenient notion of natural selection, but it’s a convenience that comes at a price, enticing us into simple explanations for complex traits. This can be a maladaptation in our understanding of evolution. The problem is most serious, perhaps, in the case of those awesomely capable beasts called humans. In a sense, we may be taking Darwin’s deep insight too deep. The idea that traits are “in the genes” in some molecular sense sounds more profound than, say, that a building is “in the bricks.” Both assertions give an illusory sense of directly enumerable causation. In fact, they’re almost uselessly generic because most traits are produced by complex interactions among tens or hundreds of different genome regions, each of which can vary in a population. This is called “polygenic” causation. The number of combinations that can yield a comparable trait has been characterized as “hyper-astronomical” (Wagner, 2011; 2014). Functionally equivalent combinations are invisible to natural selection so that by phenogenetic drift (Weiss & Fullerton, 2000) they vary among individuals and over time and populations, softening the sense in which organisms can be said to be genetically hard-wired for a given trait. A repertoire of alternatives buffers species against changeable environments, as well as providing redundancy that serves as a resource for the evolution of new traits. Genetic exchangeability makes traits more evolutionarily robust than if they were due to a single gene responding to a single aspect of the environment. I’m sure Darwin would agree that it’s the trait, not a particular genotype, that is the adaptation. However, this is small comfort when trying to understand a trait that is important to many species. I call this trait adaptability, the open-ended ability to assess the environment and choose responses to it. Whereas “adaptation” usually refers to specific environmental factors, “adaptability” refers to unforeseeable situations. Adaptability applies to a great many traits, notably including behavior, which is a fundamental aspect of life, and not just for humans. To illustrate what I mean, let’s start with two examples that provide something to think about. The first example is complex behaviors that at least seem to be hard-wired reflexes; the second clearly involves more than that.