"We should all still hope that specific causes are found for devastating conditions like autism, schizophrenia and OCD, but a mountain of evidence suggests that such hopes are unlikely to succeed."
I get that Nesse makes some important points re evolution etc, but DAMN does he make sweeping claims about "devastating conditions".
Is it the “devastating” part you are referring to? Sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, and sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings, and at times a source of strength… some degree of ambivalence helps in thinking about this.
I thought of autism in particular - I'd say very few writers who are themselves autistic would like to describe that as a "devastating condition". For my own part, yeah, I've had my fair share of "devastation", but I still take issue with talking about a whole bunch of psychiatric conditions in this sweeping way. Saying "sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings" like you do now, is VERY different from just going "devastating conditions" period. Also combined with that "we should still hope to find specific causes" - is the implication here so that everyone can be cured one day, so that only neurotypical people will remain?
I agree about not overgeneralizing the "devastating" part. But isn't an even bigger problem here that the generalization implied in his statement is at odds with the purported goal of evolutionary psychiatry to highlight and explore any functional and adaptive aspects of these conditions?
So glad to see you bring up Subrena Smith's matching problem paper, as I think this (and Huang's) is an important critique that I rarely see people engaging with, wherever one might fall in their agreement/disagreement. Curious what you think about its relevance and whether you were fully satisfied with Jesse's response.
To me this is a great example of a certain fault line you often see between those who feel strongly that empirical research must rest on sufficiently coherent philosophical grounds to be defensible, and those who consider philosophical/conceptual coherence less essential (if perhaps still desirable) as a precondition for viable research programs, where the latter find such critiques hopelessly abstract.
I believe that we should separate sharply our vulnerability to psychological disorders from our vulnerability to infectious diseases.
The rise in deaths from infectious diseases in the last five thousand years is a result of a profound change in human lifestyle. For a long time, the hunter-gatherer bands lived in a high level of isolation from each other. Think about isolated Inuit communities before the advent of the snowmobile or isolated tribes of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Interestingly, this once universal human lifestyle closely resembled the social pods that some people organized during the early months of the COVID pandemic. These pods generally avoided human contact and masked up, except with a small group of careful human beings with whom they socialized face to face.
However, a great change became possible with the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and the real shift came with the arrival of cities about five thousand years ago which crammed together thousands of human beings in close quarters with suboptimal sanitation. These cities also had regular trading relationships with other population centers. Thus, whatever germ jumped over from an animal species (the usual source of new human infectious diseases) had an environment in which to spread that was one hundred times more advantageous than the dispersed hunter-gatherer bands which had been our habitat for so long.
Basically, our vulnerability to infectious diseases reflects the fact that our immune systems evolved to meet the challenges of living in isolated hunter gatherer bands, and we now live in cities, breathing on each other, having sex with strangers, and shaking each other’s unwashed hands.
"We should all still hope that specific causes are found for devastating conditions like autism, schizophrenia and OCD, but a mountain of evidence suggests that such hopes are unlikely to succeed."
I get that Nesse makes some important points re evolution etc, but DAMN does he make sweeping claims about "devastating conditions".
Is it the “devastating” part you are referring to? Sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, and sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings, and at times a source of strength… some degree of ambivalence helps in thinking about this.
I thought of autism in particular - I'd say very few writers who are themselves autistic would like to describe that as a "devastating condition". For my own part, yeah, I've had my fair share of "devastation", but I still take issue with talking about a whole bunch of psychiatric conditions in this sweeping way. Saying "sometimes devastating, often quite impairing, sometimes experienced as dangerous gifts and mixed blessings" like you do now, is VERY different from just going "devastating conditions" period. Also combined with that "we should still hope to find specific causes" - is the implication here so that everyone can be cured one day, so that only neurotypical people will remain?
I agree about not overgeneralizing the "devastating" part. But isn't an even bigger problem here that the generalization implied in his statement is at odds with the purported goal of evolutionary psychiatry to highlight and explore any functional and adaptive aspects of these conditions?
So glad to see you bring up Subrena Smith's matching problem paper, as I think this (and Huang's) is an important critique that I rarely see people engaging with, wherever one might fall in their agreement/disagreement. Curious what you think about its relevance and whether you were fully satisfied with Jesse's response.
To me this is a great example of a certain fault line you often see between those who feel strongly that empirical research must rest on sufficiently coherent philosophical grounds to be defensible, and those who consider philosophical/conceptual coherence less essential (if perhaps still desirable) as a precondition for viable research programs, where the latter find such critiques hopelessly abstract.
I believe that we should separate sharply our vulnerability to psychological disorders from our vulnerability to infectious diseases.
The rise in deaths from infectious diseases in the last five thousand years is a result of a profound change in human lifestyle. For a long time, the hunter-gatherer bands lived in a high level of isolation from each other. Think about isolated Inuit communities before the advent of the snowmobile or isolated tribes of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Interestingly, this once universal human lifestyle closely resembled the social pods that some people organized during the early months of the COVID pandemic. These pods generally avoided human contact and masked up, except with a small group of careful human beings with whom they socialized face to face.
However, a great change became possible with the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, and the real shift came with the arrival of cities about five thousand years ago which crammed together thousands of human beings in close quarters with suboptimal sanitation. These cities also had regular trading relationships with other population centers. Thus, whatever germ jumped over from an animal species (the usual source of new human infectious diseases) had an environment in which to spread that was one hundred times more advantageous than the dispersed hunter-gatherer bands which had been our habitat for so long.
Basically, our vulnerability to infectious diseases reflects the fact that our immune systems evolved to meet the challenges of living in isolated hunter gatherer bands, and we now live in cities, breathing on each other, having sex with strangers, and shaking each other’s unwashed hands.