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Randolph M. Nesse

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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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Book:Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
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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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Book:Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
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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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Book:Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
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