It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.

Dennett is challenging a common “commonsense” explanation of preference: that we like things because they possess an intrinsic property (sweetness, sexiness, cuteness, funniness) that directly causes our liking. He argues the causal direction is often reversed when viewed through Darwinian evolution: we experience certain things as sweet/attractive/cute/funny because natural selection shaped our perceptual and emotional systems to find those cues rewarding, given their past adaptive payoffs (e.g., calorie-rich foods, fertile mates, vulnerable infants, socially useful humor). The quote encapsulates Dennett’s broader project of using evolutionary thinking to dissolve intuitive but misleading explanations that treat values and meanings as built into the world rather than constructed by evolved minds.