Feelings, not facts, are what evolution actually optimized

Wright argues that natural selection didn't design the brain to perceive reality accurately — it designed the brain to feel things that historically led to survival and reproduction. Hunger, fear, lust, and social anxiety exist because ancestors who felt them at the right moments outcompeted those who didn't, regardless of whether the feelings tracked truth.

This means our default experience of the world is constantly filtered through an emotional lens tuned for ancestral payoffs, not present-day accuracy or well-being. A rival's success can trigger reflexive resentment that served old status competitions but serves modern happiness poorly; a doughnut can trigger craving calibrated for scarcity that no longer exists for most people.

Wright treats this mismatch as the starting point for everything Buddhism diagnoses as a source of suffering: we mistake evolved feelings for objective judgments about what matters. Takeaway: before trusting a strong feeling, ask whether it's reporting truth or just executing an old survival strategy.