Erasing Our Alternative Selves: The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness

Outside of the world of thought experiments in which we can imagine the absence of any sort of influence, there are forces that erase certain possible variations of the original cue ball. The particular set of forces that acted on the subsequent variations of the original cue ball is what is known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, or EEA. If the sum of what we are is simply the result of purposeless variation that hasn't been erased, then in order to understand the nature of an organism, human or otherwise, we need to recognize what those erasing forces were. Although it might be expedient to exclude physical forces that are common to everything within the biosphere, I don't want to do that; I want to start with the original cue ball and determine exactly how it resulted in the variations at the outer edge of the Great Ring of Cue Balls.

We can start with the forces that erased possible variations on the bee, for example, just to keep things kind of simple. Possibilities are: extremes of temperature, gravity, radiation from the sun, availability and nature of building materials (elements like hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, etc.), presence of predators, particularities of food sources (e.g. shape of flowers), wind, rain, earth's electromagnetic field, etc. The list goes on and on. In the original thought experiment, a bee can exist that weighs 12 tons and uses argon, helium, and gold as the building material for its body, but in reality a bee can't be 12 tons because it would fall straight out of the sky. Nor could it procure enough calories to sustain such a large body. Nor could that body be made from argon, helium, and gold because these elements are too scarce (plus their natures don't lend themselves to the reactions that allow for life, though I'm not sure why). Anyway, the bee as we know it is a pared down version of a huge range of theoretical versions that couldn't exist due to the particular environmental forces in which it exists.

That set of forces that erased all those theoretical variations is what is known as the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. This is a key concept in understanding human nature. Just like the bee, we are only one version of a huge range of theoretical versions of our alternative selves. So I want to pose the question: what are some of the forces that have erased our alternative selves?