Evolution of Confidence

Response to a very fine post that was referenced in The Daily Dish

The nuance of evolutionary psychology is that my brain did not evolve "for" anything but past fitness test by way of my parents (and grandparents) genome's constant struggle for life. Beginning 70000 years ago the human fitness landscape was shaped in every generation on a population of phenotypes that were selected for
Symbolic ties between our verbal clues (proto-words) and the physical objects (nouns) and actions occurring between those physical object (verbs). The selection pressure was not 'for' anything. Certainly not investment banking and piloting jet aircraft.

But I designed computers for years that were not 'for' anything. Except running the code of the last generation of computers. Which were designed to optimize, in an environment of struggle for survival against Intel, National Semiconductor, Zylog and the like.

In 1980-1984 when I worked on the design of the 68881 Floating Point Co-processor for the 68020 we did not optimize either microprocessor 'for' the Macintosh because, even though the 128K Mac ran on the predecessor 68000, because we did not have access to Mac GUI since we started the designs before 1984. So how did we design something 'for' the lady with the hammer? The same way that my ancestors designed for yesterdays challenges by pressing mental machinery designed by evolution but not 'for' anything that was going to happen next.
Following the floating point code step by step, which is all I got paid for, resulted in Mandelbrot zooms and weather forecasting and (strange loop alert) engineering workstations used to build more advanced computers. Which were designed for last years problems.

So evolution design with past information and we frail humans imagine that we also must be designed 'for' something. And we are - we are designed to make our grandparents happy and successful. This is my rebuttal to the argument from teleology that often creeps into our intuition about evolution.