This supplies a further reason why our values are not immediately or inevitably available to us. It's not just that they lie mainly in our drives, rather than in our conscious purposes. It's also that these values are “in” our drives not just by virtue of how those drives are now, but by their past. My values are settled by selection that worked largely before me—in the history of my species and society. And even there, this selection worked quite above or behind my ancestors' conscious sense of what they valued and why. The mechanisms selecting values are opaque to us, despite our ordinary confidence that we understand and choose our own values. We don't really know what we want. To find out, we need genealogy.

-- John Richardson, Nietzsche's New Darwinism, chapter 2, p 77

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