Blondie and Reverse Engineering

. . . . American engineers analyzed the MIG en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Kum-sok in order to determine why it was superior in performance of the US F-86 and then used the insights acquired to modify the design future fighters and tactics. This is reverse engineering: starting from the form of a designed object, analyzing it, and discovering its function. If we consider the human brain and cognition to be “objects” designed by natural selection, we can approach them in the same way. We start with the comprehensive description of the structure of cognition, identify what it is designed to do, and then use this insight to describe how and why it evolved.

Perhaps the most well-known example of this approach is Buss’s (2003) discussion of the male preference for certain female body proportions. First, Buss established through controlled experiment that males (college students, initially) were more attracted to silhouettes of individuals with a waist-to-hip ratio of about 80 percent. He then documented that this preference was not culturally determined but was in fact true for all human groups around the world, even though the standards of body pulchritude varied considerably (from thin to fat). He concluded that the human male perceptual system was designed to be sensitive to these body proportions. He could then ask why> His answer is not really surprising: the function of this perceptual sensitivity is to detect females who are healthy and fecund (reproductive potential). Over time, natural selection favored males who had a visual system sensitive to the body proportions of young adults females. ~ Page 78