Sometimes the evolutionary underpinnings are far removed from the thing they generated. (Like a faded memory or some translucent thread of impetus that's barely differentiated from a dream.)
Pretty good example is physical beauty. The evolutionary underpinning is that it's a health & fertility metric. The human brain approximates health and fertility with visual information and higher value is more beautiful.
However, once that neural system is in place, the one that takes an image decides on its level of beauty, it takes on a life of its own. Keep in mind that it doesn't truly measure health and fertility, it's just a method of approximating that with visual information.
The beauty system can't evolve very fast because (mostly) it's burned into the network at the level of DNA programming.
Once that system is in place, people can actually evolve toward what happens to be beautiful... regardless of what is healthy or fertile (because of sexual selection). Although eventually, evolution will always make sure that choices are made to favor survival and reproduction.
Anywaze, point is something like a flower ends up beautiful - and it isn't a fertile human at all. Probably because of the interplay between (1) our beauty system designed to favor nice symmetric smooth curvy things and (2) the flower's own evolution to look nice when animals see it. Because flowers are there just to get the animal's attention after all.
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