Figure 1: This stepper machine is my kind of fitness landscape. Fitness, in evolutionary biology, measures an organism’s expected reproductive success. Utility, in economics and decision theory, measures an agent’s preferences, i.e. it is what we seek out. We often blur the lines between what an organism wants and what it evolutionarily needs. Why do we love sugar? The standard explanation is that in ancestral environments, sweetness signalled calorie density, which aided survival and r...
