(Untitled)

[kateorman]

Another rather strange idea from evolutionary psychology: a couple of scientists suggest an evolutionary advantage to depression. That it helps us think analytically, encouraging us to withdraw and obsess when faced with difficult social problems.

My own experience makes it very difficult to accept that it has anything other than a catastrophic

Comments

[iblis_kukl]

Certainly the notion that one of my blue funks could lead to my descendants looking like the telepathic buttheads of Talos IV could serve to cheer me up....

eliazar

[kateorman]

I reckon what you're saying is a much more likely explanation - these dudes think there's some direct advantage to depression, not that it's a side-effect of something else that's advantageous. One of those "spandrel" things.

[rainbowjehan]

I, uh. Huh. Okay. Interesting. When I'm depressed, I can't think analytically because I can't actually look at information anything like objectively. Everything just becomes a reason the world hates me and I deserve to die. I'm not seeing this.

[strangedave]

I thought it was an interesting notion. It doesn't necessarily mean that depression as we know it has an advantage, it may be that depression as we know it represents the mechanism gone badly wrong, but the mechanism itself still has an advantage -- I'm thinking here of something like the way auto-immune diseases represent a valuable mechanism gone haywire.

[kateorman]

What you're suggesting is (a) not what they're claiming and (b) a whole heck of a lot more likely IMHO!

[jvowles]

Perhaps the distinction is between the sort of temporary depression or "blues" that most everyone gets, and the clinical disease that one gets treatment to handle.

[kateorman]

Glancing at the links they've included, I think that's exactly the case.