I agree with you.

People that are otherwise intelligent always seem to inject pre-conceived notions into the idea of evolution. As if evolution is a "path" instead of mostly unrelated tweaks/optimizations. I suppose it's not as easily digestible to frame it in that context. The following just isn't as sexy:

- "At some point in history, immediately capable offspring stopped being an evolutionary advantage for humans."

- "Women who produced smaller babies less likely to die in childbirth, augmenting their ability to procreate."

- "Infants able to survive at a smaller birth-size more likely to pass on their genes."

I think the bias you're criticizing is teleology. [1] I suspect we have something akin to a Purpose Co-Processor. Further that I'm using said co-processor to annotate it as such. The inclination to trust these annotations is intuitive and automatic. To be valuable they only need to be optimal and not necessarily true. Resisting this urge should be part of the instruction for any epistemic discipline. Like evolutionary theory. The problem with most "people that are otherwise intelligent" is that they're optimality junkies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

Yeah, this is clearly not good science. I actually hate this article.

You can read the details of the simulation in the original paper.

https://colala.bcs.rochester.edu/papers/piantadosi2016extrao...

I believe you were looking for this?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2713

Any time you read somebody saying "Everyone knows...", question that claim.