Randolph M. Nesse > Quotes

“Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, "suffering from tragedies that never occur"? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Like fever and pain, anxiety and low mood are useful normal responses to some situations.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people?

Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Most behavior is in pursuit of a goal. Some efforts are attempts to get something, others to escape or prevent something. Either way, an individual is usually trying to make progress toward some goal. High and low moods are aroused by situations that arise during goal pursuit. What situations? A generic but useful answer is: high and low moods were shaped to cope with propitious and unpropitious situations.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Every textbook description of a disease should have, in our opinion, a section devoted to its evolutionary aspects. This section should address the following questions: 1. Which aspects of the syndrome are direct manifestations of the disease, and which are actually defenses? 2. If the disease has a genetic component, why do the responsible genes persist? 3. Do novel environmental factors contribute to the disease? 4. If the disease is related”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The German psychologist Jutta Heckhausen, now in California, studied a group of childless middle-aged women who were still hoping to have a baby. As they approached menopause, their emotional distress became more and more intense. But after menopause those who gave up their hope for pregnancy lost their depression symptoms.81 The irony is deep: hope is often at the root of depression.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about waht other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Chlamydia, today´s most common cause of venereal disease, does the equivalent of hiding in the police station.
Schistosomes of the mansoni type go a step further and essentially steal police uniforms. These parasites, a serious cause of liver disease in Asia, pick up blood-group antigens so that they may look to the immune system like our own normal blood cells.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“[Mood allocates] investments of time, effort, resources, and risk taking to maximize Darwinian fitness in situations of varying propitiousness. High and low moods adjust cognition and behavior to cope with propitious and unpropitious situations.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“In the clinic it is obvious that what patients believe about human nature influences their lives and problems.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Internal medicine doctors know the functions of the kidneys. They don’t confuse protective defenses such as cough and pain with diseases such as pneumonia and cancer. Psychiatrists lack a similar framework for the utility of stress, sleep, anxiety, and mood, so psychiatric diagnostic categories remain confusing and crude.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“All organisms are shaped to behave in ways that increase fitness even if that decreases health and happiness. Did you ever desperately want to have sex with someone even though you knew that could lead to disaster? Most people have, with sometimes dire consequences. Then there are the rest of our desires and the inevitable suffering because they cannot all be fulfilled. We want so badly to be important, rich, loved, admired, attractive, and powerful. For what? the good feelings from succeeding are just about balanced by the bad feelings from failure. Our emotions benefit our genes far more than they do us.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The greatest boon of modern life is also the greatest villain: the availability of plentiful food.30,31,32,33,34,35 Or, rather, foodlike substances manufacturers concoct with the exact combinations of sugar, salt, and fat that we most desire.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The body is not shaped for maximum health or longevity; it is shaped for maximum transmission of its genes. Alleles (different versions of a gene) that increase the number of offspring become more common over the generations, even if that shortens life and increases suffering. This is not merely theoretical. Half of the human population has been shaped by selection to live fast and die young.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The body is not shaped for maximum health or longevity; it is shaped for maximum transmission of its genes.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“First, the rest of medicine recognizes symptoms, such as pain and cough, as protective defenses and carefully distinguishes them from the disorders that arouse them. In psychiatry, by contrast, extremes of emotions, such as anxiety and low mood, are categorized as disorders, irrespective of any situation that might be arousing them. This error is so basic and pervasive that it deserves a name: Viewing Symptoms As Diseases (VSAD).”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Strong selection for extreme mental capacities may have given us all minds like the legs of racehorses, fast but vulnerable to catastrophic failures. This model fits well with the idea that schizophrenia is intimately related to language and cognitive ability.93 It also fits well with the observation that schizophrenia may be intimately related to the human capacity for “theory of mind,” our ability to intuit other people’s motives and cognitive abilities in general.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The very idea that negative emotions can be useful can seem preposterous to those who are experiencing them. To get beyond such understandable skepticism, here are four good reasons for thinking that symptoms have evolutionary origins and utility. First, symptoms such as anxiety and sadness are, like sweating and coughing, not rare changes that occur in a few people at unpredictable times; they are consistent responses that occur in nearly everyone in certain situations. Second, the expression of emotions is regulated by mechanisms that turn them on in specific situations; such control systems can evolve only for traits that influence fitness. Third, absence of a response can be harmful; inadequate coughing can make pneumonia fatal, inadequate fear of heights makes falls more likely. Finally, some symptoms benefit an individual’s genes, despite substantial costs to the individual.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The mechanisms our minds use to anticipate the results of our actions are inadequate for coping with modern media.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The general human tendency to ignore the effects of situations and to attribute problems to characteristics of individuals is so pervasive that social psychologists have a name for it: “The fundamental attribution error.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Selection shapes brains that maximize the number of offspring who survive to reproduce themselves. This is very different from maximizing health or longevity. It is also different from maximizing matings. That is why organisms do things other than having sex. Especially humans. Having the most offspring requires allocating plenty of thought and action to getting resources other than mates and matings, especially social resources, such as friends and status. Everyone else is doing the same thing, creating constant conflict, cooperation, and vast social complexity whose comprehension requires a huge brain.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Eating sweets creates a desire for more sweets, in what has been called sugar addiction.1 Strains of bacteria in our guts that are fed straight sugar may manipulate us to eat the kinds of food that allow them to grow faster than other bacteria.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Many of our current health problems result, nonetheless, from the environments we have created to satisfy our desires. Most people in developed societies live better now physically than the kings and queens of just a century ago. We have a surfeit of delicious food, protection from the elements, time for leisure, and relief from pain. The accomplishments are spectacular, but they also cause most chronic disease.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“During most all of human evolution, it was adaptive to conserve energy by being lazy as circumstances permitted. Energy was a vitally needed resourse and could not be wasted. Today this take-it-easy adaptation may lead us to watch tennis on television when we would be better off playing it. This can only aggravate the effects of excess nutrition. The average office worker would be much more healthy if he or she spent the day digging clams or harvesting fruit in scattered tall trees.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Chen H, Li C, Zhou Z, Liang H. Fast-evolving human-specific neural enhancers are associated with aging-related diseases. Cell Syst. 2018 May;6(5):604–11.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry