Executive summary: The post argues that evolutionary cost-balancing arguments, especially the “Evening Out Argument” that frequent or unavoidable harms should evolve to be less intense, are too weak and biologically unrealistic to justify confident conclusions about net wild animal welfare.
Key points:
The “Evening Out Argument” assumes suffering has metabolic or neural costs and that natural selection economizes its intensity when suffering is frequent, but the author argues this logic is overapplied.
The argument may plausibly apply to short-lived species where pain-guided learning has little future value, but it fails for long-lived species whose survivors benefit from intense learning signals despite high early mortality.
Much animal suffering comes from background motivational states like hunger, anxiety, and vigilance, which function continuously and cannot be “toned down” without undermining survival.
Chronic and maladaptive suffering can persist because it does not significantly reduce reproductive success and because evolution tolerates costly design flaws and path dependencies.
Hedonic systems are likely modular rather than governed by a single dial, undermining simple cost-balancing predictions about overall suffering.
Environmental change and mismatch from ancestral conditions further weaken any expectation that suffering would be efficiently “evened out” by evolution.
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Executive summary: The post argues that evolutionary cost-balancing arguments, especially the “Evening Out Argument” that frequent or unavoidable harms should evolve to be less intense, are too weak and biologically unrealistic to justify confident conclusions about net wild animal welfare.
Key points:
The “Evening Out Argument” assumes suffering has metabolic or neural costs and that natural selection economizes its intensity when suffering is frequent, but the author argues this logic is overapplied.
The argument may plausibly apply to short-lived species where pain-guided learning has little future value, but it fails for long-lived species whose survivors benefit from intense learning signals despite high early mortality.
Much animal suffering comes from background motivational states like hunger, anxiety, and vigilance, which function continuously and cannot be “toned down” without undermining survival.
Chronic and maladaptive suffering can persist because it does not significantly reduce reproductive success and because evolution tolerates costly design flaws and path dependencies.
Hedonic systems are likely modular rather than governed by a single dial, undermining simple cost-balancing predictions about overall suffering.
Environmental change and mismatch from ancestral conditions further weaken any expectation that suffering would be efficiently “evened out” by evolution.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.