Sad Hominid Arguments

Another “just-so” story, this one of a particularly pernicious kind (anyone who thinks that severe depression gains you friends has been lucky enough never to suffer it). The “recipe” is spot-on, except it neglects the element of adolescent male fantasy that characterizes most of this stuff.

“This isn’t undeniable yet, is it?”

As so often – depends how you define ‘undeniable.’ Of course anyone is at liberty to deny it. But the denials may not all that convincing. For example the question then becomes, if our minds are not a product of evolutionary forces, what are they a product of? Some sort of force that is immune to change? What would that be?

The “right wing” comment made my jaw drop too. In my experience evolutionary psychology nonsense has been marshalled primarily to justify things like cultural and moral relativism, worldviews not typically associated with the right.

Rather than right-wing, a more exact description would be “realist”. This is the kind of style of economic and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest. The only question is to nominate the “self” that is interested.

For EvPSych theorists it’s supposedly the genes. However, they slip up surprisingly often and cite individually self-interested behavior in support of their model and against its putative enemy the Standard Social Science Model.

The results of this are normally, as Henry says, supportive of the free-market right, but the style of analysis is unappealing to the traditionalist right [most obviously to the majority of the US right who reject the theory of evolution in the first place]

Well, I wanted to post a response to a comment, but the comments were closed:

“No, impossible. We all know that Vincent Foster was murdered by Hitlery, after Bill fathered a child by a black mother, ”

Actually, I think everyone is pretty sure that Vincent Foster committed suicide and that Bill Clinton may have paid child support, but the poor kid flunked the DNA test he was talked into by a tabloid.

That whole tangled mess says many things.

…

Hmm. Did Platinga really explain it? Or did he just purport to. Or are you just claiming that he did.

Evolutionary psychology is an empirical science, and Cosmides and Tooby’s Wason selection task experiments are a nice example of this.

The knee-jerk antipathy against evolutionary psychology/sociobiology is getting very tiresome to me. It’s clearly ideological and politically motivated, as Henry inadvertantly demonstrates. I’m just not seeing the sinister social darwinism from the majority of actual scientists in this field that Henry claims above. And not all its lay proponents are thus fairly characterized, either. I can say that I’m a leftist and someone that finds evolutionary psychology persuasive who has zero—zero—interest in using it to justify or further a right-wing social agenda.

What I do strongly suspect, though, is that the overwhelming majority of people on this planet are either explicitly or implicitly dualists, leftists included. Leftism has long been associated with a dualist “clean slate” position on mentality, and this is the real implicit political conflict. Similarly, many disciplines and intellectual traditions have a lot at stake in holding to an implicit or explicit dualist position on mentality.

Most everyone believes that the human mind is qualitatively exceptional or even unique in the universe. It’s my long-considered opinion that this is just stupid. Get over ourselves.

Mutual Aid, Keith. Check it out. There’s more to life than Pinker.

rilkefan – you don’t seem to have an argument as far as I can see – merely a claim (with no stated justification) that my motivation is a dislike of the politics. Wrong. If people came up (as a couple do, I believe) with sociobiological justifications for socialism, I’d find them equally unconvincing. My objection is to sloppy functionalism and ad-hoc explanations.

Keith – you’re attacking a bit of a straw man here mate. Indeed, it’s a _standardized_ straw man – a variant on the usual evolutionary psychology retort that any critics are blank-slater Luddites. Not so. The claims that (1) the human mind is the product of evolution, (2) that this is amenable to scientific study, and (3) that large portions of evolutionary psychology are pseudo-scientific nonsense are entirely compatible with each other. It’s an approach with low intellectual and evidentiary standards – some useful work, but also an awful lot of rubbish. As for your claim that “many disciplines and intellectual traditions have a lot at stake in holding to an implicit or explicit dualist position on mentality,” I presume that you’re referring to the notorious Cosmides and Tooby “Standard Social Scientific Model,” which is neither standard, nor social scientific, nor much of a model – it’s a convenient whipping boy that has absolutely nothing to do with social science as it is practiced in real life. There just aren’t many (or perhaps even any) real, mainstream social scientists who make these kinds of claims, or who make arguments that rest even implicitly on a blank slate model. Cultural anthropologists don’t count as social scientists by the way – they tend not to buy into the scientific enterprise at all.

DJW – I think that your claim that functionalist moves are fallacious is a bit too strong. There are legitimate functionalist explanations – it’s hard to explain the eye without reference to its functions of seeing, finding food, avoiding predators etc. The problem as I see it is when functionalism becomes an excuse for lazy, sloppy, ‘just so’ arguments, which are more grounded in the prejudices of the ‘scientist’ than in testable arguments, or in any real attention to the likely mechanisms of causation. I’ve read an awful lot of evolutionary psychology over the last few years (mainly where it touches on economic theory) that consists entirely of ‘just so’ arguments, and nothing else.

Deserving of further sociological study is the affinity the cultural right has for EP–the cruder, the better. I should clarify that by “cultural right,” I mean here the science warriors of the Gross & Levitt generations and assorted hangers-on. Note the shocking ineptness of Pinker’s Blank Slate book and Wilson’s Consilience.

Primitive anti-Freudianism explains part of it, as cultural criticism is always ultimately psychological, and EP might offer a more easily graspable and ideologically convenient model than Freud’s (or of the prevalent Freudo-Marxian syntheses).

Just read the original Hagen, Watson & Thomson piece. It seems so… modest. Consider:

“…a person suffering a major negative life event frequently needed help from social partners. Such events might have included death of a spouse, a relationship gone bad, or a failed project that degraded socioeconomic standing or reputation.” (p. 2) “Our theory is in accord with the common perception that depression and suicidality are ‘cries for help.'” (p. 3)

In other words: sometimes, people have it really bad in life, and need help from others. Their becoming depressed and even suicidal are often signals (intentional or otherwise) of this need for help. Nothing to dispute here. Onward to conclusion (skipping the ‘testing’ of the hypothesis itself):

“Our hypothesis suggests that when one’s usual labors run aground, depression leverages one’s value to others to overcome social barriers to future success.” (p. 5)

It can’t be that difficult to come up with an interpretation of this sentence so that it comes out commonsensically true. Next sentence:

“Depression’s communicative and extortionary powers depend on the interdependence of the depressed person and group members.” (ibid.)

Absolutely…how much help a person in trouble can expect to get or will get depends on the sorts of people he is in contact with and the sorts of ties he has with them. Next sentence:

“Today, many people live in large, anonymous cities, often far from families and close-knit support groups. People have jobs and even marriages where they can be more easily replaced than in the human EEA [environment of evolutionary adaptedness; i.e., think huntergatherers].” (ibid.)

That sounds right…Ceteris Paribus. So I can expect the grand conclusion:

“The intensity and incidence of MDD [Major Depressive Disorder; i.e, depression big time] may be increasing to overcome the weaker
inter-individual fitness ties of modern societies.”

When help is far away, or hard to get, the person in need of help gets more depressed…and finally:

“Medicine accepts that treating symptoms alone is a stopgap; identifying the underlying etiology, and treating with that in mind, is far preferable.”

So: If the reason why Bob is depressed is because his wife left him, pumping him full of drugs may not be the best solution…

I hate to say it but I’m at a loss here: is there something here that is actually controversial? Do people who, say, believe in Biblical Creationism disagree with the substance of the above? Conversely, do we really need “Darwinism analysis” (p. 6) to accept some version of the truth of the hypothesis proposed?

“Buss (1984 and 2002) argues that men seek attractiveness in a partner (correlated with fertility, since you ask) while women seek wealth, and that this is hard-wired and unalterable.“—Neil

There’s little guarantee (anthropic principle silliness aside) that the universe will conform to one’s wishes or expectations. A bone of contention in that sentence would be what you mean by “unalterable”; but if we put aside the strongest and widest usage of that term, I’ll say that I think this claim is likely true.

I’m an old-school feminist (not a difference feminist) and anti-sexist. Particularly in regards to sexism, my views strongly originated from the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate. In 1982, I asserted that sex differences, other than the grossly physiological, were cultural and not biological. Over the intervening 22 years, I’ve been forced to reluctantly concede that male and female brains differ in significant ways and that male and female minds are likely to similarly differ. I am not the least happy with the sociopolitical implications of this, particularly as it provides ammunition to anyone (left or right) who have a vested ideological interest in making arguments from nature. (That is, arguments from nature are almost always quite conservative or quite radical—their telos is ideological.)

The nature/nurture conflict annoys me enormously because A) it’s obvious that the reality of the situation is not either/or; and B) I don’t feel morally constricted by either and certainly not both in combination. For example, biological determinism is self-evidently absurd since, as a matter of practical fact, no one actually believes it. No one could believe it—which, for most purposes, is the same as it not being true. Similarly, a nurturist point of view doesn’t threaten me—I’m not discombobulated by the implied relativism or the strong emphasis on culture.

These are not, to my mind, inherently political ideas in the sense that it’s the ideas that shape reality and not the other way around. I’m an empiricist, reality is what it is. Often, it won’t be what we want it to be. And so, perhaps, this is another battlefront in the Science Wars. Cue Ophelia.

If there weren’t the very unfortunate historical context of deterministic, positivist thought playing a role in a variety of grandiose, bigoted, simple-minded and sometimes fascist ideas in the early and mid-twentieth century, this discussion wouldn’t be so damn politically charged. The contemporary critical response to evolutionary psychology seems to me to be very reactionary in the most literal sense of the word. It’s your side that’s setting up and knocking down a strawman, though the historical context makes this understandable—I’m sympathetic with the suspicions and motivations but ultimately disagree with the conclusions. The bottom line is that there is no good reason (Mr. Halasz’s thoughts notwithstanding) not to examine human behavior using the exact same methods and paradigms we use to examine animal behavior in general. (This isn’t to say that examination of human culture doesn’t create a contextual layer that rides atop and requires its own vocabulary and methods.) And everything we know about evolutionary biology would indicate that sexual attraction in humans, more than anything else, would be amenable to an evolutionary, behavioral, analysis. And this is an example you are using of egregiousness.

Finally, the “just so” criticism recalls too strongly for my taste Gould, which makes it inherently suspect. Gould was not, by expertise, an evolutionist and often exceeded his professional competence in his popular writings.

keith m. ellis:

I did not say that biological roots of human behavior could not be meaningfully investigated. I merely implied that that would be something less than half the story and that I do think that the “added contextual layer” accounts for quite a lot. (For an basic example of “social scientific” explanation, I would refer to the account of “double contingency”, in Niklas Luhmann’s “Social Systems”, a functionalist, too boot, though not a simple-minded one.) Further, I also think a nature/nuture dichotomy is fruitless, as there is a considerable area of their interpenetration, cultural structuration taking up where strictly biological definition proves insufficient, while responding to and channeling underlying biological pressures. (The example of sexual desire would do fine here, for it is all the more provoked and stimulated by its cultural channeling: strictly speaking, the notion of “wealth” would make no sense in a purely natural context.) Questions about so-called “human nature” are most fruitfully address in this third zone of interpenetration. But that precisely does not invite highly reductive approaches.

Keith wrote (sorry, I don’t know how to italicise or bold using this thing).

“There’s little guarantee (anthropic principle silliness aside) that the universe will conform to one’s wishes or expectations. A bone of contention in that sentence would be what you mean by “unalterable”; but if we put aside the strongest and widest usage of that term, I’ll say that I think this claim is likely true.”

There’s no guarantee that the universe will conform to one’s wishes. The conclusions for which Buss (and so on) argue are unpalatable, but that doesn’t show they’re false (though that is a reason for them to have taken much greater care than they did in constructing their arguments). I don’t have proof that men and women have the same cognitive potential. What I can show is that Buss, et al., do not establish that they don’t. Their arguments suffer from major flaws. Hone in on the points at which they attempt to explain apparent exceptions to their claims. They soon get themselves in a terrible tangle. For instance, Buss can’t explain female preferences for younger males in parts of China, or the growing emphasis that women in the West place on looks, or the complete disregard for female virginity in desirable marriage partners in many Western countries. All of these falsify his predictions, as he recognizes. He needs to explain them, but he fails. Similarly, Alcock can’t explain the preference for the “wrong” WHR in some tribes. These people think that culture is a thin veneer on a genetically entrenched base, and need to explain away cultural variations. They fail miserably.

Keith: “For example, biological determinism is self-evidently absurd since, as a matter of practical fact, no one actually believes it. No one could believe it—which, for most purposes, is the same as it not being true”

Well, that depends on what you mean by biological determinism. Plenty of folk – Pinker, Wilson, Buss, Cosmides and Tooby – hold that all well-functioning (where we give well-functioning a relatively uncontentious reading: able to live a life at subsistence level or above which isn’t entirely miserable or grossly dysfunctional) human being will display certain behaviors, selected from a very narrow range. Come to think of it, I believe that too. I just think they’re far fewer and more abstract then these people think.

This shouldn’t be a battle in the science wars. EP, when its bad (and its not always bad) is bad science, not just bad politics.

Keith: “The bottom line is that there is no good reason (Mr. Halasz’s thoughts notwithstanding) not to examine human behavior using the exact same methods and paradigms we use to examine animal behavior in general. (This isn’t to say that examination of human culture doesn’t create a contextual layer that rides atop and requires its own vocabulary and methods.) And everything we know about evolutionary biology would indicate that sexual attraction in humans, more than anything else, would be amenable to an evolutionary, behavioral, analysis. And this is an example you are using of egregiousness”

I’m not sure I disagree with any of that. Of course tastes and preferences have biological bases. I’m certainly not saying we ought not to study X because we might like what we find. I’m saying that study of (in this case) sexual behavior in human beings has been, apparently, politically motivated and prejudiced: it has sought to establish a certain conclusion at any cost to the evidence. The arguments just don’t stack up. My own view is that our (once again, biologically based, in some sense) preferences are amenable to all kinds of cultural reshaping. We human beings come into the world radically incomplete: we’re not anything in particular before culture fills in the details (which isn’t to say that there might not be fixed points here and there, which all cultures will have to accommodate). But that view is independent of my criticisms of EP.

Keith: “Finally, the “just so” criticism recalls too strongly for my taste Gould, which makes it inherently suspect. Gould was not, by expertise, an evolutionist and often exceeded his professional competence in his popular writings.”

I think that’s unfair. His last, massive, work is a theory of evolution. Many evolutionary biologists disagree with him, but none of them think he’s not competent to comment. There’s a sense in which all good biologists are evolutionists (Theodosius Dobzhansky: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”). Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory is taken seriously, as is the “spandrels” essay. I think the consensus view is that he made a genuine contribution to evolutionary theory, even if it is was less important that he thought.

Loy: Maybe we can give these claims a commonsense reading (I, too, believe that depression is a reaction to life events). But that seems to strip them of their interest.

I got so caught up with defending Gould I forgot to reply to Keith’s criticism of me. Where is the just so story in what I say, Keith? I take it that the JSS criticism of EP is this: anyone can make up a story according to which some behavior is an adaptation. Its too easy, so not explanatory. I said the exact opposite: there isn’t a plausible story you can tell which has as its upshot the range of adaptations claimed by EP (eg, a preference for WHR of 0.7 except in certain conditions, or for virginity except where is there contraception, or for depression as an adaptation). This isn’t imposing a condition on EP from on high: this is how – as they agree – the game is played. A behavior counts as an adaptation iff it was laid down in the EEA because it enhanced fitness.

It makes sense to try and uphold the ideal of nominating people who would actually excel at their job.

This is, of course, the crux of my complaint regarding functionalist explanation. It’s as if these hardened science warriors never read Popper.

“rilkefan – you dont seem to have an argument as far as I can see …”

Henry, I don’t think you have an argument either – I guess you didn’t pick up the (intended) parodic function of my comment. I read your post as: you don’t like A because you don’t like it, then you say it’s an example of blah, except that it isn’t – well, see my post. The set of links would have been more convincing without the commentary.

The domain claimed by ev psych is hardly a “solid” reality whose provenance and import are incontestable, such that it must be grappled with by compelling reasons so as to establish a sense of orientation in the world and of our disposition to the world that orients us- or, at least, some such account belongs to the integrity and obligatoriness of natural science proper. To the contrary, it is a rather sketchy and adventitious affair. This is not to deny that we are bodily beings of a given species, that has emerged from natural history, and that we bear with us something of the predilictions and tendencies of our evolutionary origins. (The thesis that I would offer is that it is precisely our organic insufficiency as biological beings that requires socio-cultural structuration to compensate for and functionally extend this biological lack, which is itself a result of our evolutionary emergence.) The oddity of ev psych is not just its ad hoc and frequently obtuse speculations, but its peculiarly historicist insistence that, were its program to be completed, it would arrive at an explanation of broadly aggregated human behavior that is not highly partial, incomplete and even rather ghostly. The fact of the matter is that, in the absence of any compelling reasons and obligatory claims, adherence to the perspective of ev psych amounts to nothing more than an existential choice, an identification “downwards”, as if human existence could be entirely confined to its bodily nature and its possibilities and potentials truncated by such terms of reference. It would seem that such a self-reification would require its own justification, an account of what motivates, if not argues for, it. The need to confine human existence to a pregiven reality and to present it as compelled by some prior necessity obviates the anxiety of exposure to the world and its complexity. Further, the really embedded conventions of extant social arrangements are defensively re-enforced by recourse to such a pre-given “reality”. But, most of all, any sense of the alterability of social arrangements or of the possibility of ethical transformation is occluded by the unalterable fixity of “human nature”, allevitating any responsibility for the burden of one’s nature and removing the threat of any response, other than adaption to the given reality. Indeed, any demand or suasion to the contrary becomes a morally outrageous imposition. (For all the genuine advances of empirical science that ev psych would like to co-opt into its program, such biologism is not exactly new or original; one might consider the work of the German reactionary philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, with his concept of “disemburdenment”, to realize that it is old wine poured into new bottles.) None of the forgoing criticism presupposes a leftist vantage point, to which I myself am partial, nor a humanist brief, to which I am indifferent. It merely asks for the conditions of honest inquiry.

By the way, I specifically asked Steven Pinker about “Just So stories” and falsifiability, both of which have been mentioned in this thread, in the email interview I did with him for B&W when The Blank Slate came out. I think his replies are well worth reading.

Hey, let’s have an argument about scientific method again. That’d be fun. I mean, as long as we’re making claims of scientific validity on the basis of simplistic analysis of method.

John, my criticism in the other thread may well apply to many evolutionary psychologists—it’s not hard to find intellectuals of all schools and persuasions who are, shall we say, “totalitarian” in their thinking. But I can’t help but feel that the critics of evolutionary psych are similarly over-reaching.

I am (more) deeply suspicious of all other models of human behavior because they are almost invariably ideologically motivated and are, essentially, contemporary moral fables. Evolutionary psychology is an infant science, at a stage of its development not unlike nineteenth and early twentiest century Darwinism. It’s naive, it over-reaches, etc. But it looks like contemporary science to me because it sees humans as part of the natural world, not as qualitatively distinct.

My “appropriate level of description” is related to my thoughts on complexity theory and I should say that I believe that with the advent of written language, human culture became distinct from human “nature” and requires its own appropriate level of description and method. As individuals, we exist both in the realm of evolutionary psychology and in the realm of culture and I do not expect a single theory to be sufficient for both realms. Because I’m not an ideologue, I don’t have a stake in this game. But I will defend various players from wrong-headed ideological attacks.

Chun the Unavoidable wrote:

“I should clarify that by ‘cultural right,’ I mean here the science warriors of the Gross & Levitt generations and assorted hangers-on.”

Why is “culutural right” an appropriate label for, say, Norm Levitt? I read his _Prometheus Bedeviled_ a few years ago, and I don’t remember anything “rightist” about it. He dismisses the U.S. Republican party as being essentially plutocratic, so he certainly isn’t a political rightist. Is it because he said he’d rather share an elevator with a crazy creationist than a deluded Deluzian? Does the modifier “cultural” mean that he prefers opera to hip-hop? What?

“Pure rhetoric” is a wonderfully descriptive phrase. Is that from The Simpsons, or am I thinking of “partisan rhetoric?”

You should check out the wonderful passage from Higher Superstition where they argue that–just hypothetically, mind you–the science faculty at MIT could do a better job at teaching the humanities classes than vice versa, if it came down to that somehow. It helps, when considering these absurdities, to realize that all of these books are symptoms of 90s funding anxieties for many big science projects in the U.S. Weinberg is at least explicit about this.

I certainly would feel better about the future with an English professor teaching differential equations than with Pinker teaching literature or philosophy. At the least the former would be humble enough to try to learn something about what they were doing beforehand, which Pinker rather plainly would not.

Keith, if it’s contrarian for a humanist to defend his field against philistines, then I’m proud to be a “contrarian.”

Just because there may be free will (what’s the EP line on this, btw?), and some permissive dictionaries allow it, does not mean that you should confuse “rhetoric” and “sophistry.” The former is a generic term; it does not mean “twisting words around in a way I find disagreeable.”

I will not respond to ad hominem remarks about my eyebrows, which my family assures me are well formed and dignified.

“…does not mean that you should confuse “rhetoric” and “sophistry.”“—Chun

I didn’t, as I think you well know. Or maybe you don’t and you should re-read Gorgias.

My “Thrasymachus” crack was meant to imply that in addition to being highly rhetorical, you’re also being sophistical.

The argument here seems to be that evolutionary psychology, as a field, should rightly be attacked…by those outside the field, clearly. Are you implying that your field should not be similarly subject to criticism from non-practitioners? Perhaps not; and certainly evolutionary psychologists and yourself have a moral right to defend your liveliehoods. But that sheds no light on the question of whether or not any of you are full of shit.

Chun:

“philistine”- is that a technical term?

Ophelia Benson:

“straightforwardness”- Which is not a rhetorical mode? At least, it’s good that you’re so straightforward as to insist that arguments are designed to prove matters without persuading.

“Just because there may be free will (what’s the EP line on this, btw?)”

I did like Dennett in _Freedom Evolves_, but still can’t quite get my head around it.

One of his points is that we have the kinds of free will that actually matter to us; the other kinds, the ones that we don’t have, we shouldn’t care much about anyway (as I said, can’t quite get my head around it).

I’m not sure I understand the argument about depression. From the way it is stated, it seems a surprisingly Lamarkian argument – one gets depressed, depression brings about help, therefore one breeds other depressives? Surely it has to be different than that.

It seems to me that if this isn’t the argument — rather, that depression is such that it creates, within a given landscape, adaptive possibilities, like getting help — then we are certainly talking about something like Gould’s spandrels — the depression itself is a disposition dependent on trauma — filling in the post traumatic behavioral space, it fullfills a self-erasing function by getting help. But why not just — call for help? Or is the argument that depression is the effect of a deeper adaptive agent, one that signals for help and uses depression, so to speak, as a signal mode?

From what I know about depression, real, clinical depression, to reduce it to a call for help is extremely superficial. Depression, after all, requires an enormous expenditure of energy, much of which is spent in keeping away from people — the so called helpers. The whole ethology of depression would seem to be the opposite of a call for help. It is like saying that a caterpillar’s cocoon is a call for help – except in the case of depression, the cocoon yields a dead butterfly.
This whole theory sounds unlikely.

A fair criticism of both HWT and their critics is that “depression” is so poorly defined. Insofar as depression is (sometimes, in some ways) what HWT are supposing it is, then their ideas may have merit.

I should say that this particular argument in this context has personal relevance—I suffer from severe, chronic depression and I am quite well aware of and struggle with the point of view that it’s “really” just a way of getting someone else to care of you. Or whatever possible personal moral failure is implied—or that Henry possibly thinks is implied—in HWT’s supposition. But I’m personally not threatened by this or take offense because “depression” is more than one thing and certainly complex and thus HWT’s ideas are interesting in that they may explain a part of it, but not all of it, and the supposed implied moral judgment against people that are depressed I either don’t agree is actually implied or, even if it is, I don’t agree that it applies to me or quite a few other people.

Man, that’s my rant. I wasn’t aware the Hayek said something similar.

At the level of description at which the concept of “free will” is useful, it exists necessarily because we must believe that it does. Any other level of description is irrelevant.

It’s a prime example of a badly formed question that far too many people grapple with.

“…since it is only symbolic language that allows for the consideration of counterfactual possibilities.“—JH

I very strongly disagree with this if (as it seems) you are equating “language” with “symbolic language”; but it’s becoming apparent to me that you hold to a language-primacy view that is very much in opposition to my view. I think we have radically different starting assumptions about the nature of reality, or something thereabouts.

I would have very much trouble construing what “non-symbolic language” would be. Even the most literal, “picture-theory” type of language is symbolic, no? And only a recombinant symbolism allows for the persistent consideration of counterfactual possibilities.

depression has evolutionary roots: It is a survival mechanism for an individual whose status has dropped dramatically. Depression suppresses a person’s desire for food, companionship, or other basic needs — an accommodation that makes sense for someone with a low social status.

Speaking as someone (else in this thread) with Major Depression, that makes almost no sense. Depression can and often does alter desire, but not need: one still needs food, even if one is too depressed to get any, and one is still damaged by the absence of companionship even as one’s perceived desire for same dwindles. In fact, such damage can worsen the depression and set up a particularly unpleasant catch-22, the adaptive value of which I cannot for the life of me imagine.

(Sorry to swipe the last word!)

loy – yes, you’re right there about it being a poor recycling of common sense stuff (and stereotypes and prejudices, also), but so is neil. The intent of these studies seems to go beyond common sense things and posit a whole theory that is just forced into the topic. And using words like “extortionary” to describe depression is not exactly the same as talking about it as a “cry for help”, is it?

I don’t know what they’re getting at by calling depression an extortion, but I too like neil cannot see how the ‘advantages’ in severe depression and suicidal tendencies. In fact, most people who are severely depressed and suicidal do refuse help or make it very hard to be helped.

Evolution seems to me kind of brought in with no real justification here. “Adaptation” is another matter, no? And if there’s anything adaptive in those behaviours, it seems a very dysfunctional way of adapting. It’s about things failing and going wrong and falling apart, not people just longing for help.

Depression can have so many causes, and does involve so many things from physical factors to behaviour and cultural or mentality factors so this kind of reading sounds very very reductive and poor. And useless. Except for intellectual debates and publishing books, probably.