Somehow I never thought about it that way. Point conceded.
The analogy survives and if anything becomes more meaningful, but is now harder to explain to a general audience: After training humans exclusively on inclusive genetic fitness, with a correlation in the outer environment to high-calorie foods, humans ended up preferring something that didn’t exist in the ancestral environment, lacks correlations to micronutrients that were reliably in ample supply in the ancestral environment and didn’t need to be optimized over, has some resemblance to things that were important/scarce like the taste of sugar and salt and fat (if the sugar hasn’t been replaced with allulose), but where it ultimately depends on properties like “the ice cream is cold rather than melted” that don’t match to anything obvious at a surface glance about the ancestral environment; and on the whole, the thing that starts to max out human tastebuds seems almost impossible to have called in advance by any simple means.
If you want the old form of the analogy, “male humans scrolling Tumblr porn” works (2D images not present in ancestral environment, Coolidge effect superstimulated). Hopefully I or somebody can think of a more general-audiences-friendly transparent example of a superstimulus than that one.
I think you have put your finger on a key aspect with the coldness requirement.
When ice cream is melted or coke is lukewarm, they both taste far too sweet. I’ve long had a hypothesis that we evolved some kind of rejection of foods that taste too sweet (at least in large quantity) and that by cooling them down, they taste less sweet (overcoming that rejection mechanism) but we still get increased reward when the sugar content enters our bloodstream. I feel that carbonation is similar (flat coke tastes too sweet), so that the cold and carbonation could be hacks we’ve discovered to get around the ‘tastes too sweet’ defence mechanism, while still enjoying extremely high blood sugar based rewards. (Other forms of bitterness or saltiness added to the sweet foods could be similar.)
More speculative and still requires a few sentences to explain though, so a different example may be best.
It could just be attention. If something would otherwise be too sweet, but some other part of it is salient (coldness, carbonization, bitterness, saltiness), those other parts will take some of your attention away from its sweetness, and it’ll seem less sweet.
Why might humans evolve a rejection of things that taste to sweet? What fitness reducing thing does “eating oversweet things” correlate with? Or is it a spandrel of something else?
Perhaps the feeling of achievement gained from cookie-clicker games, such as FarmVille and such, that have taken over all the old and young people’s temporary attention? Gambling in Gatcha or Online Gambling? Opioids epidemic?
Somehow I never thought about it that way. Point conceded.
The analogy survives and if anything becomes more meaningful, but is now harder to explain to a general audience: After training humans exclusively on inclusive genetic fitness, with a correlation in the outer environment to high-calorie foods, humans ended up preferring something that didn’t exist in the ancestral environment, lacks correlations to micronutrients that were reliably in ample supply in the ancestral environment and didn’t need to be optimized over, has some resemblance to things that were important/scarce like the taste of sugar and salt and fat (if the sugar hasn’t been replaced with allulose), but where it ultimately depends on properties like “the ice cream is cold rather than melted” that don’t match to anything obvious at a surface glance about the ancestral environment; and on the whole, the thing that starts to max out human tastebuds seems almost impossible to have called in advance by any simple means.
If you want the old form of the analogy, “male humans scrolling Tumblr porn” works (2D images not present in ancestral environment, Coolidge effect superstimulated). Hopefully I or somebody can think of a more general-audiences-friendly transparent example of a superstimulus than that one.
I think you have put your finger on a key aspect with the coldness requirement.
When ice cream is melted or coke is lukewarm, they both taste far too sweet. I’ve long had a hypothesis that we evolved some kind of rejection of foods that taste too sweet (at least in large quantity) and that by cooling them down, they taste less sweet (overcoming that rejection mechanism) but we still get increased reward when the sugar content enters our bloodstream. I feel that carbonation is similar (flat coke tastes too sweet), so that the cold and carbonation could be hacks we’ve discovered to get around the ‘tastes too sweet’ defence mechanism, while still enjoying extremely high blood sugar based rewards. (Other forms of bitterness or saltiness added to the sweet foods could be similar.)
More speculative and still requires a few sentences to explain though, so a different example may be best.
If this is true, it’s fascinating, because it suggest that our preference for cold and carbonation are a kind of specification gaming!
It could just be attention. If something would otherwise be too sweet, but some other part of it is salient (coldness, carbonization, bitterness, saltiness), those other parts will take some of your attention away from its sweetness, and it’ll seem less sweet.
Why might humans evolve a rejection of things that taste to sweet? What fitness reducing thing does “eating oversweet things” correlate with? Or is it a spandrel of something else?
Increased body weight or development of type 2 diabetes, for example?
Perhaps the feeling of achievement gained from cookie-clicker games, such as FarmVille and such, that have taken over all the old and young people’s temporary attention? Gambling in Gatcha or Online Gambling? Opioids epidemic?