| Most people love to eat cake. But, why? One answer is because cake tastes good. This is a proximate explanation that concerns the trigger of a particular behavior. This explanation is important, but it does not address the deeper question of why cake tastes so good in the first place. Here’s another answer. An attraction to the sight, smell, and taste of foods rich in sugars and fats helped motivate our ancestors to obtain calorie-dense foods and survive in an environment that was often scarce in calories [1]. Our ancestors who were highly attracted to fatty foods were more likely to obtain them, survive, and pass their taste for cake on to future generations. The result is that it is often hard for us modern day consumers to pass up molten lava chocolate cake regardless of our (ever expanding) waistlines. This is an ultimate explanation that concerns the adaptive function of a particular behavior: the general desire to eat more cake than vegetables is an adaptation. This kind of ultimate explanation is central to the study of consumer behavior from an evolutionary theoretical perspective. An evolutionary approach dates back to Darwin’s theory of natural selection [2]. Natural selection is the process by which biologically influenced characteristics become either more or less common in a population depending on how those characteristics affect an individual’s reproductive fitness — the passing of genes on to future generations. Characteristics that enhanced reproductive fitness were passed on to the next generation, whereas those that impeded it were not. Natural selection therefore maintains particular characteristics because they have (or once had) fitness benefits. Natural selection produces characteristics that fall in one of the following categories: Adaptations: characteristicsthat reliably solved adaptive problems better than competing alternatives during evolutionary history (example: fear of poisonous snakes). By-products: artifacts without adaptive value that persist because they are inherently coupled with adaptations (example: fear of harmless snakes). Noise: variations in a given characteristic that are due to random environmental events or genetic mutations (example: most rare types of fears, such as fear of flowers). |