Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 4:38 am Post subject: Mental ills may have an evolutionary upside
Not sure if this was posted before but it's something to ponder on. I'm sure most of us already knew this to be true deep down though.
Quote:
Natural selection wants us to be crazy — at least a little bit. While true debilitating insanity is not nature's intention, many mental health issues may be byproducts of the over-functional human brain, some researchers claim.
As humans improved their gathering, hunting and cooking techniques, population size increased and resources became more limited (in part because we hunted or ate some species to extinction). As a result, not everyone could get enough to eat. Cooperative relationships were critical to ensuring access to food, whether through farming or more strategic hunting, and those with blunt social skills were unlikely to survive, explained David C. Geary, author of "The Origin of Mind" (APA, 2004), and a researcher at the University of Missouri.
And thus, a diversity of new mental abilities, and disabilities, unfurled.
Nature of joy
It might seem as though modern man should have evolved to be happy and harmonious. But nature cares about genes, not joy, Geary said.
Mental illnesses hinder one in every four adults in America every year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. And this doesn’t count those of us with more moderate mood swings.
To explain our susceptibility to poor mental health, Randolph Nesse in "The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology" (Wiley, 2005) compares the human brain with race horses: Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness — to a point.
Let's take common mental conditions one-by-one.
People with aggressive and narcissistic personalities are the easiest to understand evolutionarily; they look out for number one. But even if 16 million men today can trace their genes to Genghis Khan (nature's definition of uber-success can be measured by his prolific paternity), very few potential despots achieve such heights. Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose.
For example, the first of our ancestors to empathize and read facial expressions had a striking advantage. They could confirm their own social status and convince others to share food and shelter. But too much emotional acuity — when individuals over analyze every grimace — can cause a motivational nervousness about one's social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.
Pondering the future
Another cognitive innovation made it possible to compare potential futures. While other animals focus on the present, only humans, said Geary, "sit and worry about what will happen three years from now if I do that or this." Our ability to think things over, and over, can be counterproductive and lead to obsessive tendencies.
Certain types of depression, however, Geary continued, may be advantageous. The lethargy and disrupted mental state can help us disengage from unattainable goals — whether it is an unrequited love or an exalted social position. Evolution likely favored individuals who pause and reassess ambitions, instead of wasting energy being blindly optimistic.
Natural selection also likely held the door open for disorders such as attention deficit. Quickly abandoning a low stimulus situation was more helpful for male hunters than female gatherers, writes Nesse, which may explain why boys are five times more likely than girls to be hyperactive.
Similarly, in its mildest form, bipolar disorder can increase productivity and creativity. Bipolar individuals (and their relatives) also often have more sex than average people, Geary noted.
Sex, and survival of one's kids, is the whole point — as far as nature is concerned. Sometimes unpleasant mental states lead to greater reproductive success, said Geary, "so these genes stay in the gene pool."
Joined: Dec 07, 2006 Posts: 297 Location: space truckin'
Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 7:49 am Post subject:
Kinda hard to fight thousands of years of evolution, best to accept and learn to work with what we have. I don't think this is off-topic though, maybe you could post it again in another forum too.
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"Evolutionary upside" being code for "having lots of babies", I can tell you with 100% certainty that clinical depression (which is the mentally ill kind, not the healthy kind described in this article) and social anxiety disorder are definitely not advantageous.
Kinda hard to fight thousands of years of evolution, best to accept and learn to work with what we have. I don't think this is off-topic though, maybe you could post it again in another forum too.
I definitely agree. =)
I wasn't sure which forum to post it in. Which forum do you suggest I should try again in?
bleach wrote:
"Evolutionary upside" being code for "having lots of babies", I can tell you with 100% certainty that clinical depression (which is the mentally ill kind, not the healthy kind described in this article) and social anxiety disorder are definitely not advantageous.
I think the author's trying to point out that when it comes to mental illnesses a little bit helps us and a lot debilitates us. But the main point is that mental illnesses have a evolutionary root.
Joined: Dec 07, 2006 Posts: 297 Location: space truckin'
Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 4:05 pm Post subject:
www.thehappinesstrap.com wrote:
Why Is It So Difficult To Be Happy?
To answer this question, we need to take a journey back in time. The modern human mind, with its amazing ability to analyse, plan, create and communicate, has largely evolved over the last hundred thousand years, since our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared on the planet. But our minds did not evolve to make us feel good, so we could tell great jokes, write sonnets and say ‘I love you’. Our minds evolved to help us survive in a world fraught with danger. Imagine that you’re an early human hunter–gatherer. What are your essential needs in order to survive and reproduce?
There are four of them: food, water, shelter and sex, but none of these things mean much if you’re dead. So the number one priority of the primitive human mind was to look out for anything that might harm you and avoid it! In essence, the primitive mind was a ‘Don’t get killed’ device, and it proved enormously useful. The better our ancestors became at anticipating and avoiding danger, the longer they lived and the more children they had.
With each generation the human mind became increasingly skilled at predicting and avoiding danger. And now, after a hundred thousand years of evolution, the modern mind is still constantly on the lookout for trouble. It assesses and judges almost everything we encounter: Is this good or bad? Safe or dangerous? Harmful or helpful?
These days, though, it’s not sabre-toothed tigers or woolly mammoths that our mind warns us about. Instead it’s losing our job, being rejected, getting a speeding ticket, not being able to pay the bills, embarrassing ourselves in public, upsetting our loved ones, getting cancer, or any of a million and one other common worries. As a result we spend a lot of time worrying about things that, more often than not, never happen.
Another essential for the survival of any early human is to belong to a group. If your clan boots you out, it won’t be long before the wolves find you. So how does the mind protect you from rejection by the group? By comparing you with other members of the clan: Am I fitting in? Am I doing the right thing? Am I contributing enough? Am I as good as the others? Am I doing anything that might get me rejected?
Sound familiar? Our modern-day minds are continually warning us of rejection and comparing us against the rest of society. No wonder we spend so much energy worrying whether people will like us! No wonder we’re always looking for ways to improve ourselves or putting ourselves down because we don’t ‘measure up’. A hundred thousand years ago we had only the few members of our immediate clan to compare ourselves with. But these days we can open any newspaper or magazine, switch on any television, tune in to any radio, and instantly find a whole host of people who are smarter, richer, taller, slimmer, sexier, stronger, more powerful, more famous, more successful, or more admired than we are. What’s the fastest way to make a teenage girl depressed? Show her a fashion magazine. When she compares herself to all those air-brushed, collagen-enhanced, digitally altered supermodels, she is guaranteed to feel inferior or downright unattractive. And the rest of us are not that different. Thanks to evolution, our minds are now so sophisticated they can even dream up a fantasy of the person we’d like to be — and then compare our ‘real’ self to that impossible standard. What chance have we got? We will always end up feeling not good enough!
Now, for any Stone Age person with ambition, the general rule for success is: the more, the better. The more sophisticated your weapons (and the more of them you have), the more food you can kill. The more plentiful your food stores, the better your chances are for living through times of scarcity. The more substantial your shelter, the safer you are from weather and wild animals. The more children you have, the better the chance that some of them will survive into adulthood. No surprise then, that our modern mind continually looks for more: more money, more status, more love, more job satisfaction, a
newer car, a younger-looking body, a younger-looking partner, a bigger house. And if we succeed, if we actually get more money or a newer car or a better job, then we’re satisfied — for a while. But sooner or later (and usually sooner), we end up wanting more.
Thus, evolution has shaped our minds so that we are almost inevitably destined to suffer psychologically: to compare, evaluate and criticise ourselves; to focus on what we’re lacking; to be dissatisfied with what we have; and to imagine all sorts of frightening scenarios, most of which will never happen. No wonder humans find it hard to be happy!
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