I’ve long suspected something like this too. Depression just didn’t make sense unless it offers some kind of survival benefit.
I’ve long suspected something like this too. Depression just didn’t make sense unless it offers some kind of survival benefit.
The problem is that logically this becomes a truism, something is part of something because since that something survived, it is part of that-which-is-there. It becomes a sort of teleological proof of the mundane, where everything must be designed by the invisible hand of evolution else it wouldn’t have “survived”; of course, since everything, unless we are studying fossils, “survived”, this means that each and every characteristic of an evolved object must have evolved with care, as opposed to being meaningless attributes. These details don’t have either way enough of a “survival benefit” to interfere or promote the creation of larger or smaller numbers of babies which is the only meaningful calculus of evolution, not simple survival. Once an animal survives to mating age, and creates a few babies, there aren’t really two hoots about every little detail of an object’s attributes as the trendy evolutionary psychologists would have you believe when we examine it according to the pseudo-scientific criteria of social darwinism, where if I like the color blue more than red has everything to do with “Darwinism” and the invisible hand of the biological marketplace.
(I say this as someone interested in logic more than the promotion of his own position, I don’t happen to believe in evolution but this “survival characterisitic of ” really tends to go to far, without even considering the evolutionary theory’s strengths and weaknesses alone, which I’m not doing here.)
Depression causes a number of potentially life-threatening behaviors, including suicide in some cases. If it didn’t have a survival benefit to counteract that, it would have all but died out of humanity centuries ago, along with tails.
You’ve got some glaring misconceptions about evolution. For instance, meaningless attributes can survive despite being meaningless, so long as they don’t harm a creature’s ability to survive and breed (though later changes might make this previously-meaningless attribute useful or harmful).
And merely having children isn’t enough… you have to have children that survive to have children of their own, which means that you have to live to raise those children too — protect them while they’re most vulnerable, teach them the non-genetic skills to survive and raise their own young, etcetera.
I can state with certainty that you’ve never actually read The Origin of Species, Darwin’s original text on evolution. I recommend that you do so; the link goes directly to the text of it. If you do, you’ll find that Darwin proves, in exhaustive detail and for several species, that those species change over time, adapting to changes in their environments. There’s no way that an intelligent person can read it and decide that he was completely wrong.
Of course, I can also state with certainty that you’ll never read it. You’ve chosen to believe that it’s wrong because your religious authority says it is, and you won’t even look at anything that might convince you otherwise… an attitude that I simply can’t comprehend.
Darwin’s not completely wrong, obviously. He also didn’t prove speciation there, he proved breeding, something no reasonable person can deny. Even Rabbi Hillel in the Talmud 2,000 years ago describes people’s physical characteristics being affected by their environment. I just think that social darwinists are going too far, and that their arguments are truisms.
What’s the difference between breeding and speciation? You get different species, if I remember correctly, when two animals of the same root genetic stock become different enough that they can’t successfully interbreed anymore. Small divergent adaptations over time, in groups that are geographically separate, resulting in different species… that’s evolution.
I’m not sure where “social darwinism” (a term that seems to be only peripherally connected to Darwin) came into the conversation.
Darwinian Psychology is a form of social-sciences Darwinism. Of course, they don’t have any proof whatsoever, unlike “Origin of Species”, for anything they are saying, it’s all speculation.