If you don't know, you have to keep trying.

If I had to convince you, I'd say that:

For many millions of years, selecting mates and being selected was much of what being animal/human was all about.

Right now, with the increasing sophistication of our brains, individual and collective, the game has diversified a lot. You can satisfy/sublimate your social and sexual instincts in other ways.

But all this is relatively recent, and our genetically conditioned pulsions haven't yet evolved to match the new conditions.

So the old thing still feels pretty damn good!

As I understand it, you are proposing a sort of evolutionary psychology theory. Humans personalities today are certain ways because of selection pressure on genes.

I think that sort of theory is mistaken because there has not been significant selection pressure on human genes recently. More specifically, there hasn't been selection pressure on human genes since around the time that humans first got personalities. So I don't think genetic evolution was able to have much influence on our personalities.

The reason there wasn't selection pressure on genes is that any survival needs could be filled faster and better by ideas, so genetic differences didn't have much chance to matter.

Define personality. In my book, dogs have personalities.

Still, rather than about personality I was talking about basic pulsions, namely those directly related to survival and reproduction.

Contrary to rms, I easily concede that ideas are faster to fill survival needs. But where do those needs come from? Why do we care about surviving, as individuals and as a species? We wouldn't ever have put our minds to work on the problem of survival if the visceral will for survival wasn't already there.

I argued that our genetic conditionings related to sexual selection persist because our genes haven't had time to 'learn' their increasing irrelevance. The slowness of genetic adaptation is an argument in favor, not against, the prevalence of genetic heritage as a factor (certainly not the only one) in our drives and personalities.

>The reason there wasn't selection pressure on genes is that any survival needs could be filled faster and better by ideas, so genetic differences didn't have much chance to matter.

Link to external evidence to support this statement, please

Genes get to make changes every generation of humans. That's every 25 years or so. And to get very far evolution can take a lot of generations.

Ideas can go through generations in a matter of seconds within someone's head. So that's orders of magnitude faster.