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Randolph M. Nesse

Randolph M. Nesse Biography

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“Plato warned that pursuing pleasure leads to unhappiness. The Buddha taught that desires can never be satisfied. Every religion provides advice about how to get off the hedonic treadmill, leaving its emotional baggage behind. However, such advice is like advice about diets: correct, well-meaning, plentiful, and, for good evolutionary reasons, well-nigh impossible to actually follow.”

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“The suffering that accompanies nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, fever, fatigue, pain, anxiety, and low mood motivates escape from a current bad situation and avoidance of future similar situations. Individuals who do not experience physical pain accumulate injuries and usually die by early adulthood. People who don’t feel bad when pursuing unreachable goals spend their lives in contented useless efforts. More low mood might help their genes, but a clinic to boost low mood would be about as popular as a clinic to help people feel more anxious.”

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“Treatment of eating disorders is improved by the recognition that strenuous dieting arouses famine protection mechanisms that are prone to initiate a positive feedback spiral.”

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“Eating disorders were not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate eating during famines were. ADHD was not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate attention were. Serious depression was not shaped by natural selection, but capacities for normal low and high mood were.”

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“Patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are surrounded by excess food, but their bodies are aware only of starvation. Their behavior is appropriate for a situation in which getting just a few extra calories might make the difference between life and death.”

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“The starting point is recognizing that selection has shaped powerful mechanisms to protect against starvation. During a famine, those mechanisms motivate animals to get food -any food- eat it quickly, and eat more than usual, because food supplies are obviously erratic. The system also adjusts the body weight set point upward because extra fat stores are valuable when food sources are unreliable. And, as noted already, weight loss slows down metabolism, which is appropriate when a person is starving but the opposite of what is needed when trying to lose weight. Also, intermittent access to food signals unreliable access to food supplies, so it increases food intake and bingeing, even in rats.”

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“Pain and fear are useful, and people who lack them are seriously handicapped. As noted already, the rare individuals who are born without the sense of pain are almost all dead by age thirty. If there are people born without the capacity for fear, you might well look for them in the emergency room or the morgue. We need our pains and our fears. They are normal defenses that warn us of danger. Pain is the signal that tissue is being damaged. It has to be aversive to motivate us to set aside other activities to do whatever is necessary to stop the damage. Fear is a signal that a situation may be dangerous, that some kind of loss or damage is likely, that escape is desirable.”

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“We can also, more than any other species, protect ourselves from being poisoned by learning about how to avoid it. Only we can read about the dangerous plants in our gardens and woodlands, and we are the the species whose diets are most shaped by social learning. A food our mothers fed us can usually be accepted as safe and nourishing. What our friends eat without apparent harm is at least worth a try. What they avoid we would be wise to treat cautiously.”

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“People are not controlled by some internal calculator that crudely motivates them to maximize their reproductive success. Instead, people form deep, lifelong emotional attachments and experience loves and hates that shape their lives. They have religious beliefs that guide their behavior, and they have idiosyncratic goals and ambitions. They have networks of friends and relatives.”

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“During most all of human evolution, it was adaptive to conserve energy by being lazy as circumstances permitted. Energy was a vitally needed resourse and could not be wasted. Today this take-it-easy adaptation may lead us to watch tennis on television when we would be better off playing it. This can only aggravate the effects of excess nutrition. The average office worker would be much more healthy if he or she spent the day digging clams or harvesting fruit in scattered tall trees.”

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“Except for professional athletes, dancers, cowboys, and a few other groups, most people in modern industrial societies have abnormally low energy expenditures. Workers sitting in swivel chairs or in driver's seats of cars or even pushing vacuum cleaners or electrically powered lawn mowers are being sedentary, and their leisure hours may be even more so.”

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“Our dietary problems arise from a mismatch between the tastes evolved for Stone Age conditions and their likely effects today. Fat, sugar, and salt were in short supply through nearly all of our evolutionary history. Almost everyone, most of the time, would have been better off with more of these substances, and it was consistenly adaptive to want more and try to get it. Today most of us can afford to eat more fat, sugar, and salt than is biologically adaptive, more than would ever have been available to our ancestors of a few thousands years ago.”

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“Just as the capacity for experiencing fatigue has evolved to protect us from overexertion, the capacity for sadness may have evolved to prevent additional losses. Maladaptive extremes of anxiety, sadness, and other emotions make more sense when we understand their evolutionary origins and normal, adaptive functions.”

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“Emotional capacities are shaped by situations that occurred repeatedly in the course of evolution and that were important to fitness. Attacks by predators, threats of exclusion from the group, and opportunities for mating were frequent and important enough to have shaped special patterns of preparedness, such as panic, social fear, and sexual arousal. Situations that are best avoided shape aversive emotions, while situations that involve opportunity shape positive emotions.”

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“Depression may seem completely useless. Even apart from the risk of suicide, sitting all day morosely staring at the wall can't get you very far. A person with severe depression typically loses interest in everything -work, friends, food, even sex. It is as if the capacities for pleasure and initiative have been turned off. Some people cry spontaneously, but others are beyond tears. Some wake every morning at 4 A.M. and can't get back to sleep; others sleep for twelve or fourteen hours per day. Some have delusions that they are impoverished, stupid, ugly, or dying of cancer. Almost all have low self-esteem. It seems preposterous even to consider that there should be anything adaptive associated with such symptoms. And yet depression is so frequent, and so closely related to ordinary sadness, that we must begin by asking if depression arises from a basic abnormality or if it is a dysregulation of a normal capacity.”

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“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about waht other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”

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Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about what other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”

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“Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.”

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“Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.”

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“The trajectory is clear: our minds have always been vulnerable to capture by alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, coca, and opium, but problems with them have escalated as advances in chemistry, transportation, and technology have increased the diversity, purity, and availability of drugs. The mismatch was bad before; now it’s getting much worse.”

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“Some cues -for instance, snakes, spiders, and heights- readily elicit fear in ourselves and other primates. It should not surprise us to discover that we instinctively avoid certain cues that have long been associated with such dangers as falling and dangerous animals.”

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“Many of our current health problems result, nonetheless, from the environments we have created to satisfy our desires. Most people in developed societies live better now physically than the kings and queens of just a century ago. We have a surfeit of delicious food, protection from the elements, time for leisure, and relief from pain. The accomplishments are spectacular, but they also cause most chronic disease.”

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“The main evolutionary explanation for the obesity epidemic is obvious; the mechanism that regulate body weight are poorly suited for our modern environments. Taking your body into a modern grocery store is like taking your computed into the summer sun. The environment is outside the range that the control mechanisms can cope with. Our environment is so different from the one we evolved in that it’s remarkable that anyone eats normally. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked miles each day gathering food and hunting game, eager to satisfy hunger with whatever they could find. The food they found was mainly high-fiber fruits and vegetables and lean fish and meat. That was only a few thousand years ago, less for many populations.”

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