Red, theory; black, fact.
8-29-2016
We live in an uncertain world, the best reason to buy insurance while you can. Insurance is too good a trick for evolution to have missed. When food is plentiful, as it now is in my country, people get obese, as they are now doing here, so that they can live on their fat during possible future hard times. They don't do this consciously; it's in their genes.
However, eating has only an additive effect on your footprint on society's demand for resources; how many kids you have affects your footprint multiplicatively. Thus, the effectiveness of biological insurance taken out in children foregone during times of plenty would be greater than that taken out in food consumed. Such a recourse exists (See Deprecated, Part 8); how well and long remembered the family name you bequeath to your children affects your footprint exponentially. (I assume that a good or bad "name" affects the reproductive success of all your descendants having that name until you are finally forgotten.) Compared to exponential returns, everything else is chump change. ("Who steals my purse steals trash." - Shakespeare)
There remains the problem of food going to waste during times of plenty because social forces prevent a quick population increase. I conjecture that the extra energy available is invested by society in contests of various sorts (think of the Circus Maximus during the heyday of ancient Rome) that act as a proxy to evolutionary selection pressure, whereby the society accelerates it's own evolution. Although natural selection pressure is maximal during the hard times, relying on these to do all your evolving for you can make you extinct; better to do some "preventative evolution" ahead of time.
Postscript 3
Since future environmental demands are partly unforeseeable, a good strategy would be to accelerate one's evolution in multiple directions, keeping many irons in the fire. Indeed, in the Olympics just concluded, thirty-nine sports were represented.
The power of these contests is maximized by using the outcomes as unconditioned stimuli that are associated with the family names of the winners and losers: the conditioned stimuli. In this way, one acquires a good or bad "name" that will affect the reproductive success of all who inherit it, an exponential effect. To ground this discussion biologically, it must be assumed that the contests are effective in isolating carriers of good or bad genes (technically, alleles), and that the resulting "name" is an effective proxy for natural selection in altering the frequency of said genes. To keep the population density stable during all this, winners must be balanced by losers. The winners are determined and branded in places like the ball diamond, and the losers are determined and branded in the courts.
