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“Everyone knows that the environments we created to satisfy our wishes for sweets, salt, fat and leisure have resulted in epidemics of chronic disease. Obesity and eating disorders are prime examples, but alcoholism and drug addiction are also made possible by ready access to substances and means of administration that have only recently become available. Lack of selection until recent times against these often fatal disorders is an essential part of any evolutionary explanation.”

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Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“Kin selection shapes tendences to make sacrifices that benefit family members who share genes identical by descent. The costs of such sacrifices are highest and most satisfying for children and siblings, but problems experienced by extended family members can nonetheless cause great distress.”

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“An extraordinary proportion of life problems and resulting mental disorders arise from mating conflicts. Unrequited love, the pain of being rejected, the fear of being left, being stalked, being harassed, jealousy and being trapped in an abusive relationship are common precipitants of mental disorders.”

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Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“...social media now seem poised to harm our mental health as much as fast food harms our physical health. We can't resist its pull despite the anxiety, depression and feelings of social inadequacy that are aroused by unprecedented social comparisons.”

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“Anxiety and fear are emotions. Emotions exist only because they have given selective advantages. This makes it tempting to try to define different emotions in terms of their functions. Fear protects against present danger, anxiety against possible dangers. However, defining emotions in terms of their functions risks tacit creationism: the tendency to view bodies as if they are machines.”

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“The scaling up of human social organization into mega-groups comprising millions (even hundreds of millions in modern nation states) would not have been possible without the human facility for culture acquisition and transmission on a massive scale.”

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Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“The evolution of sexually selected traits can create particular kinds of vulnerabilities to mental disorders, which are often skewed in their sex ratios. Examples of mental disorders where sexual selection may play an important role include eating disorders, sexual dysfunction and schizophrenia.”

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“The idea of mismatch is based on the fact that adaptations are shaped by selection within a given environment. If the environment changes rapidly and radically, some biological systems run the risk of becoming mismatched to the new environment. This is also referred to as -genome lag-.”

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“Parental investment theory predicts that, on average, the sex that invests more in its offspring, including the size of gametes, gestation, lactation and child rearing, will be more selective when choosing a mate, and the less-investing sex will engage in more intra-sexual competition for access to mates.”

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“When an organism can react in a protective way for little cost but potentially huge benefit (e.g. avoiding death), the optimal system expresses many false alarms. Vomiting may only cost only a few hundred calories and a few minutes, whereas not vomiting risks death from poisoning.”

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Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“The great questioner. the social animal, in a limitless world of mystery, intrigue and dangers. Why did the sun rise and fall and influence the growth of plants and food? What were the stars that moved silently through the sky and the planets that wandered between them? What had happened to our relatives who had died, or what would happen to our children in the future? What excitement and wonder when they met an outside group, tried to communicate and exchanged and bartered goods, hearing tales of other lands and frightening beasts.”

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“We are sole hominin survivors, but not the inevitable masters. Luck, as much as biology, might have been key to sapiens’ place in the world. Our existence as a species is due to a series of devastating, largely random catastrophes, each of which overhauled the planet and its ecosystems, providing new opportunities: from the meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs but unleashed mammals through to climate change in Africa some 2 million years ago and the emergence of the great savannahs.”

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“For most of human evolutionary history our species lived as hunter-gatherers; hence, much of our cognition and behavior is adapted to this way of life. Given the magnitude of the sociocultural, economic and lifestyle changes experienced by Homo Sapiens over the last 10,000 years, in particular the last several hundred years, aspects of human psychology may be maladapted to modern ways of life.”

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“Thus, for our ancestors, social networks were a matter of life and death, group living was the norm and social isolation was rare, carrying fatal risks. In turn, psychological mechanisms promoting the maintenance of social relationships have been heavily favored by natural selection.”

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“Such is the magnitude of our evolved psychological dependence on social interaction that, even when surrounded by individuals who have committed the most heinous crimes, solitary confinement for more than 15 days is considered psychological torture by the United Nations.”

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“The sexual competition hypothesis suggests that women are vulnerable to eating disorders because modern media augment the natural motivation for having a desirable body in order to get better mates. This explains why so many women use extreme caloric restriction in intense efforts to be attractive, but it does not by itself explain anorexia nervosa and bulimia.”

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“An individual may feel guilty about the event(s) that triggered their depression. Feelings of guilt make one reflect upon how their actions led to that outcome and thus help minimise the likelihood of the same thing happening again. The greater the role oplayed by one's own actions in the situations that led to the event that triggered the depression, the greater the sense of guilt.”

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“An individual may feel guilty about the event(s) that triggered their depression. Feelings of guilt make one reflect upon how their actions led to that outcome and thus help minimize the likelihood of the same thing happening again. The greater the role played by one's own actions in the situations that led to the event that triggered the depression, the greater the sense of guilt.”

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“The belief that one is unattractive can be as intractable as the belief that one has an undiagnosed disease. It's often present in people who are, to other people's perceptions, very attractive indeed. However, once the belief in one's unattractiveness gets established it can be used to account for all manner of experiences, such as being rejected by a date. The normal trait related to this disorder is wanting to be attractive. In the usual range, this is almost certainly useful.”

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Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“Nightmares concerning animals under the bed are very common and easy to interpret in an evolutionary context where there were many wild animals but no houses. When children begin social life in groups, fears of being rejected or abandoned emerge in a process that elaborates into the extraordinary richness and complexity of social life.”

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