We are innately lazy. But lazy is such a loaded term. Lets say “Scrooginess” instead to mean the type of laziness I describe; We spend calories like Scrooge McDuck spends money. He will spend it when he needs to, but he won’t spend it when he does not need to. And he will only spend the exact amount needed, not a cent more. And that is how we spend calories. It is so deeply engrained in us that we frequently die from obesity in a world where food is abundant and cheap. We will spend calories to reproduce, and signal our health to potential mates, but all our skills and all our activities besides that tend to be very prone to scrooginess.
Our activity level is not higher even though we have lots more calories available. Which is weird, after all when you have more money, you spend more money. Its not like if you win the lottery, you’ll spend only the amount of money as you did before winning. Meanwhile, in calorie terms, that is precisely what we do. I call this scrooginess-bias.
Let me explain. Every cognitive bias we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Can basically be summed up as “a way to make a decision with fewer calories than doing it correctly”. That’s how our brain works, it makes calorie shortcuts to every decision we make. Its actually possible that people with problems making decisions, have partially broken calorie-shortcut mechanisms, so they lack some of the biases that make us immediately decide something so as to save calories.
A small sidestep that is good to know when discussing scrooginess in general; The definition of skill vs intelligence:
Skilled people have spent a lot of calories to establish neurological pathways for said task (lets say chess, or a branch of mathematics). The chess experts will already have lots of chess situations (especially early game ones) locked in the brain’s neuron patterns. They can effectively consciously and unconsciously remember calories they spent in the past. Having the ability to call upon partially or fully pre-made decisions (we walk because of this, you don’t have to figure it out again every morning, but if you have a stroke you might have to work it out again and re-learn that skill, among other skills).
And intelligence is just your total sum of skills. Note that being able to walk is a skill, as is hearing, talking, seeing (did you know your vision is actually upsidedown but the brain learns to convert it the right way up?) etc. So this definition of intelligence allows us to rank all living things (and artificial things) on the same intelligence scale.
We COULD go skiing, rollerblading, lasertagging, tennis playing, dancing, jogging, swimming, trampoline jumping, base jumping, rope skipping, football playing, basketball playing, dart playing, pool playing, hiking, camping, fishing, hunting and planting some tomatoes all in one day with the amount of calories we have cheaply available.
But we don’t.
We COULD learn braille, sign language, spanish, portugese, russian, mandarin, welsh, german, italian, advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, city planning, behavioral economics, tango, waltz, breakdancing, guitar, piano, drums, herdy gerdy, trombone, unicycle, slackline, juggling, walking on hands, parkour, freeclimbing, woodworking, welding, flying, kayaking, scuba diving, fly fishing, alpine skiing, painting in all its forms, composing music, filming, editing movies, stone sculpting, pottery, blacksmithing, greenhouse farming, permaculture farming, food preservation, advanced food making, writing, mechanical maintenance, sailing, massaging, singing, sewing, shoemaking, fabric dyeing, stone masonry, brick making and jewelry making.
But chances are we might only do a little bit of some of this. Mostly the ones that don’t cost too many calories, and mostly the ones where we could meet a sexual partner. And then most of the time we sit in the sofa. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone learn advanced mathematics for fun, even though the mathematicians who do it professionally generally find the whole thing pretty emotionally rewarding.
With all these calories and activities available, why is there ever a stationary moment for our mind and body?
If you never had that innate “scrooginess” that keep everyone from spending calories, then the reward would be more delicious cake, pizza, burger, french fries, pancakes, bacon sandwiches, licorice, buns, stir fry, soup, lobster, steak, roast and lightly fried fish fillets. Without becoming fat from it. AND a richer life from all the extra stuff we would be doing with all those calories!
Sharks’ resting activity is to swim. If you made a shark intelligent enough to ask it why it bothers to swim, it would not understand your question. Sure it might say its because it would suffocate if it stopped swimming, but it would also ask you why you bother sitting on the sofa doing absolutely nothing. It would say “doing nothing gains you nothing, gets you nowhere”. But to us, whenever you do anything that uses extra calories, you are met with lots of people who try to “save” you from wasting calories, by going “why do you bother?” or “why don’t you do it this way? This is way easier” or “you shouldn’t bother thinking about that, its not your job to solve that/do that”. And you’ll meet these sentiments even if you’re struggling through university to eventually help cure cancer, “why bother? they’ll probably also do it without you I’m sure” they might say.
Those movies called “Cars” are only realistic in one regard, most of them sit around with full fuel tanks watching other cars drive around a track. Remember that petrol to those cars is basically their hamburgers and milkshakes. If the “Cars” movies were made by an intelligent shark species then there would be no spectators. All racing would involve tens of thousands of cars. Because all the spectators would want to race themselves instead of spectating.
Even though it was nice to have Scrooginess when food was scarce and we needed that extra bit of fat to make it through winter, maybe we can all agree that slightly less of it would be nice now. We’d all have richer lives, slimmer figures and more good food. We would probably be a bit smarter, a bit better at our job, a bit better at our hobbies, a bit more forward thinking, a bit more wise, a bit more patient, a bit less prone to make mistakes, have slightly fewer accidents, have more fun, have more interesting thoughts and ideas, more interesting conversations and discussions, be slightly more kind and be slightly less gullible. We might even have a little bit of empathy, but I wouldn’t stop swimming waiting for that.
Postscript: This is a rewritten version of a reddit comment I made in response to the question: “What are some flaws with vertebrate biology (or even Earth animal biology in general) that you wouldn’t want to repeat when designing artificial organisms from scratch?” – If I could have my pick then I’d have a quicker reaction time to abundance of food. So that if any species suddenly have an abundance of food year over year, then scrooginess immediately goes down.
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