Does this mean evolution is bunk? No, clearly not. In fact, it's evolution's fault. Evolution is path-dependent and only maximizes one thing: reproductive fitness. Your eye, for example, has a blindspot in because the rods and cones are behind the fibers that project to the brain. This is an objectively stupid "design" and the eye would be better without it (as octopus eyes are), but...it's there because it was there in your ancestors, and theirs before them and it was good enough for all of them, and even better than whatever their competitors had at some point. Evolution doesn't improve anything but reproductive success.
So you're correct: environmental physics which have never been survival-relevant will have no selection pressure.
But I think you are very incorrect to say that because our brain ignores the nose part of our eyesight that we have an inaccurate model. A model in process-control-speak means some kind of mathematical description, not the inputs to the controller.
More accurate models presumably have costs (e.g., bigger brains are metabolically expensive). The fitness landscape has local maxima, and they may be hard to move away from (as in the eyes I mentioned above). There are lots of caveats like those.
We know that a lot of internal models are not particularly accurate. The visual system only acquires a tiny bit of high-resolution data at time (with a hole in it[0]) and interpolates the rest. Loss aversion, the gamblers' fallacy, and the rest suggest we're not great at modelling uncertain outcomes. Even mental models of physics differ from reality in some key ways [1].
It's possible that these are still slowly improving, but I think it's more likely that much better models have an unfavorable cost-benenfit profile.
[0] The blind spot is different from the nose. There's a whole in your representation of the world, a few degrees away from the center of gaze. Your brain fills it in in surprising ways. Here's a fun demo that's a big hit with kids too: http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/blindspotdem...
[1] Josh Tanenbaum's group has some cool studies looking at people's mental models of physics, which you may find interesting: https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short
I’d enjoy hearing more about this. Go on, or point to more info?
But more fundamentally, I believe there is a theorem which asserts that it is in general impossible to extract the open loop behavior of a system (i.e. a model of how the system would respond without a controller) solely from closed loop data (i.e. data collected from the system when the controller is on.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4
>“The current approach is based on the idea that amyloid-β is bad,” says Perry. “My idea is the opposite.” He suggests that amyloid-β and tau accumulation is actually a protective response to age-related metabolic pressures in the cell.
I've been at an academic lecture where a process control engineer used the example of air conditioning to explain that when your system is controlled, you have to be extremely careful about correlation and causation. If you're not, you can very easily conclude that because the room is hot whenever the AC is running hard, that the AC running hard makes the room hot. He then showed that biologists were making this mistake with respect to certain biomarkers and cancer.
Process control is interesting even in philosophy. For example, there is a process control theorem which proves that the maximally efficient regulator must have an accurate model of the process being regulated. Therefore, anyone who argues that evolution gives us no reason to expect our brains give us an accurate picture of the world must be ignorant of process control. After all, our brains are regulators of our environment for our survival; therefore the maximally efficient way for our brain to regulate our environment is for our brain to have an accurate model of our environment.