"melvin"  wrote in message
news:cidugs$u29$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> I have encountered a very interesting problem where a complete paper
> was written
> on methods of approach to this problem.
> 
> The problem is, in a game show, every round a contestant is shown 3
> unopened doors, two have a goat and one has a car. The contestant then
> chooses a door that remains unopened and the host always opens one of
> the other two doors which always reveals goat. Should the contestant
> switch? The answer is yes with a success of 2/3 if the contestant
> always switches. Most people think the chances are 50/50 and it makes
> no difference and the problem leads to many heated debates. Many
> people never become convinced of the correctness of
> the solution and for many it remains counterintuative
> 
> Some psychologists have studied in detail what leads people to the
> right or wrong conclusion and it would be interesting if one could do
> a study to tie in evolutionary pressures in intelligence to shed light
> on why the approaches to this problem are so divergent or if certain
> types of thinking though wrong still have an evolutionary benifit
> which outweighs the negative effects of incorrect reasoning.
> 

It could be my lack of imagination (and I am not sure about what exactly is
going on in the game show) but I have a hard time to see how this kind of
logic would have been required at any time in our evolution.

But *if* the game show does reveal an instinctive logical deficiency in
most people this would not be the only example of that our evolution has
locked-in a less than optimal trait in our genophenotype.

The most widely-known such trait (that we share with most seeing animals)
is the blind-spot creating trajectory of the optical nerve - that it arises
from the retina on the least favorable side, and has to traverse the retina
on its way to the brain.

Functural [functionally structural] trade-offs (or IOW "negative
spandrels" - that tend to throw a spanner in our works or stuff us
up;) can and does clearly exist - they can exist as long as their negative
effects have on the whole not out-weighed the positive (adaptive) effect of
the "genophenotyping" mutation(s) that in the first place caused
the introduction of such a "tandem (positively adaptive and a
negatively adaptative) trait".

P
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