So, human beings tend to overlook subtraction. But the question remains: Why? Perhaps the behavior of another species might suggest an answer.
Male bowerbirds also do a lot of adding. But they don't add soup ingredients or Lego blocks. Instead, they add sticks, leaves, and colorful objects to their nests – bowerbirds are the showy architects of the bird world. What's more, a lot of this addition seems arbitrary. The bowerbirds never use these nests. As soon as the female has decided which complicated nest she likes the most, she mates with the male who built it, and then they leave the palatial nest behind.
So why does the male bowerbird add so much stuff to a nest that will never be used? There’s a straightforward answer: it helps him demonstrate his competence to potential mates.
Competence is important to humans, too. In fact, we have an intrinsic biological desire to feel competent. After all, it's much better to look and feel as if you're in control of your surroundings rather than out of control, isn’t it?
Of course, choosing to subtract can also be a competent decision. But the problem is, it's much harder to demonstrate your competence through subtraction. After all, how can you show what you’ve taken away? Even if subtracting is the competent choice, you're not left with much evidence that you made the right call.
The author, for instance, keeps thousands of documents on his computer that relate to his subtraction research. He knows he should delete most of them, and yet . . . he doesn't. Somewhere deep in his brain, crafted by millions of years of evolution, his instinct is to keep adding to this collection of first drafts and pointless subfolders. In this way, he keeps building his own bowerbird nest.
But there’s another biological reason why humans overwhelmingly add rather than subtract, and it has to do with food. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, any opportunity to acquire food was a good thing. It meant survival. As a result, our brains evolved to react positively to acquisition. But not just to the acquisition of food – to any acquisition at all. This means that whether we’re adding a juicy peach or a useless plastic freebie to our possessions, our hunter-gatherer brains react in the same, triumphant way. Quite simply, adding feels good.
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