There has been a great deal of speculation about the evolutionary significance and origins of depression. What selective advantage does it confer?
- Does it allow the patient to concentrate on complex and important problems?
- Is it a type of pain that, like physical pain, causes us to pull back from danger?
- Is it a type of behavioral quarantine, causing us to hole up in a safe place while dangers stalk around outside?
- Perhaps it reduces our libido and our appetite for social interaction in order to stop us getting or giving infectious disease?
- Is it a simple signal that we need help?
- Is it a sort of threat to others in our community that, unless they do something to help us, they will have a liability in their midst that could endanger them?
- Is it a sort of fuse, switching us off and causing us to back down when we are outgunned – so saving us from risky and costly conflicts with our peers?
Well, possibly. But much disease is the result of the malignant transformation or manifestation of a physiological response that is usually useful. Auto-immune illness and allergy, for instance, are damaging consequences of facilities without which we would be dead. So the desire to squeeze depression into the neo-Darwinian paradigm is not necessarily misconceived. What is misconceived, I suggest, is the sheer fancifulness of many of these suggested explanations. Their authors are too clever, ingenious, and imaginative.
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I would take issue with some of the points this author raises but maybe that *is* the point – that we should say “it’s not like that for me” and start a reasoned discussion. If it’s not like *that* then what *is* it like?
And, more importantly in my opinion, what can be done to alleviate the condition.
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