What drives the evolution of play behaviors?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Adding to that, perhaps in some cases, play exists not just to build skills—but to keep young animals from doing something incredibly dumb with their free time, like masturbating wandering up to a mature predator while mom’s taking a nap. Natural selection might’ve said, “Hey, instead of dying young, how about you wrestle your siblings or push a twig instead?” IOW: better to burn calories on nonsense than become someone else’s lunch.

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The neuroscientist jaak panksepp was a pioneer into the neuroscience of emotions who wrote a book called ‘affective neuroscience’ which discusses 7 core emotional systems in the brain. one of which was the PLAY system.

I can’t find a better citation, so I’ll just go with this one which discusses the 7 emotional systems Panksepp found

  1. SEEKING/EXPECTATION - This is our default circuit. When SEEKING is high, we are curious and enthusiastic. We need SEEKING to motivate us to get out of bed in the morning, to be social, to anticipate, search, collect, accumulate. We get attention. The negative side of SEEKING is addiction. Depression is the result of not having enough SEEKING.
  2. PANIC/GRIEF - This circuit can be understood as separation anxiety, the feeling of separation and loss - or fear of separation and loss, including fear of emotional distance.
  3. FEAR - This is the circuit where feelings of imminent death or doom caused by a real or perceived threat. Sometimes people dissociate or freeze as part of the FEAR response.
  4. RAGE - RAGE is caused by thwarted SEEKING. Underlying RAGE is always FEAR.
  5. CARE - The CARE circuit allows us to feel love and empathy and is fundamental for empathy.
    6. PLAY - This very important circuit teaches us fairness, sharing, turn-taking, reciprocity, equity, justice and respect.
  6. LUST - We need this circuit to procreate, and to feel religious zeal.
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See @Stranger_On_A_Train’s first post to the thread?

Also I want to be clear that their comment

is a large part of what I was referencing in my noting that the last portion of what I cited seems to in keeping with much of the thought of our discussion here.