The author argues that emotions have developed to promote survival and reproduction, by increasing our ability to cope with certain situations. the defensive function of certain responses (e.g.evolution selects for reproduction rather than health.trade-offs between increased vulnerability in one area and decreased vulnerability in another.limits on what natural selection can do to select for/against certain characteristics.infectious organisms evolving more rapidly now than in the past.a mismatch of genes to current conditions (e.g.He argues that the biggest problem with current psychiatric research is the lack of acknowledgement of the role of situational factors.įrom an evolutionary psychiatry perspective, there are six key areas of vulnerability: For example, he discusses the flaws of the DSM without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He takes the rather refreshing approach of acknowledging both the good and the bad of the field of psychiatry. Nesse digs into the science of evolutionary psychiatry to understand why mental illness persists, He explains that while the illnesses themselves aren’t evolutionary adaptations, our vulnerabilities to them may have had evolutionary purposes. But it didn’t.Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Dr. “Why are there so many? Why are they so common? Natural selection could have eliminated anxiety, depression, addiction, anorexia and the genes that cause autism, schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness.

Nesse-a psychiatrist who has made himself an informed devotee of evolutionary biology-brings his expertise to one of the key questions in biology and medicine: Why are we so vulnerable to mental illness? “Why do mental disorders exist at all?” he asks. Randolph Nesse, director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, is a leader of what might be called “evolutionary psychiatry”-a medical discipline that hardly exists at present, but which promises in particular to help us understand individual behavioral pathologies. For some time I’ve been predicting that the academic field of evolutionary psychology, which studies how natural selection has influenced the working of the human mind, will eventually go extinct: Eventually, all psychology will be understood as a result of evolution.

Good reasons for bad feelings book