Nature, by whatever mixture of chance and natural necessity, of natural selection and other less predictable evolutionary processes, has given us capacities for theoretical understanding in fundamental physics and higher mathematics that were of no conceivable use (as such) in the adaptive environments in which our hominid line evolved. For similarly unknown reasons it has made us phenomenally conscious experiencers of affective happiness and suffering.

Leonard David Katz, Hedonic reasons as ultimately justifying and the relevance of neuroscience, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.) Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 409–417, p. 416