I don’t have nerve pain, praise oG, but from what I have heard of it it is torture.
I know pain evolved to discourage us from engaging in behavior detrimental to our survival and fitness. Tissue damage, social demotion, malnutrition, etc. But what purpose does nerve pain serve?
Nerve pain isn’t going to stop you from getting painful nerves, as prehistoric humans didn’t have the ability to avoid slipping a vertebrae. Plus nerve pain can totally immobilize someone, making them easy prey for predators. All nerve pain would do in the wild is disable someone and kill them rapidly. The pain of hunger drives you to find something to eat. Pain of social trauma to avoid being kicked out of the group. Nerve pain would just make you an easy target fr predators and unable to take care of yourself.
If drugs like cocaine and meth artificially overactivate the reward centers of the nervous system, does nerve pain just artificially overactivate the punishment centers of the nervous centers (triggering intense pain designed to alert to tissue damage with no benefit to the organism).
I guess a small % of people have diseases that are very detrimental to survival survive in our species and always have (mental illness, nerve pain, severe headaches,etc).
Plus nerve pain tends to hit in middle age, by that age your kids should be teenagers at least so there is no incentive to keep someone alive at that point from an evolutionary POV.
I would say pretty much this. There are lots of detrimental things that happen after this point, including senescence and death. The evolutionary pressures are not so great after your offspring have themselves had time to reach adulthood (indeed before that for many species).
Also, evolution isn’t perfect and we are not the finished article. The design of our spine is full of compromises due to our relatively recent change of posture.
Furthermore, plenty of negative features exist as side effects of positive ones. Nerve pain for a minority of people usually in middle age may be the (current) trade-off for very effective nociception in the majority of cases.
I think I’ve covered the main explanations for why features detrimental to an organism may exist.
It’s a mistake to think that every aspect of physiology is adaptive in all circumstances. Our sense of pain is generally adaptive, being beneficial in warning us of danger, or teaching us not to do something again. But sometimes it overreacts, or goes haywire for various reasons. These reactions may not be at all beneficial. They simply can’t be eliminated by evolution if you still want to have a system that works well under normal circumstances.
This. I have diabetic neuropathy in my feet and it feels like someone is sticking and electrified fork into them. As far as I am concerned, nerve pain has no fucking purpose.
Yes, it’s kind of like saying “what’s the purpose of heart fibrillation? I can see how the heart pumping is useful, but why would we evolve a mechanism to make the heart beat so fast it can’t effectively pump blood anymore?” The answer isn’t some grand reason why having heart attacks is good, it’s that the ability to have heart attacks doesn’t affect the reproduction rate enough to matter. (At least not compared to whatever biological tradeoffs we’d have to make to not potentially suffer from them).
Nice example. I’ll have to remember that if I’m asked to explain something like this.
On a similar note, I remember a lecture on the 4 types of shock, where it was pointed out that some of the responses were ‘maladaptive’. After puzzling about it for a bit, I came to realize that the mechanisms of shock exist to tide us over mostly for dehydration (probably pretty common and often survivable, if you have compensatory mechanisms), and occasionally for significant bleeding (although I suspect that most cases of significant bleeding end up being terminal for animals). Shock responses were not designed specifically to carry us through heart failure or sepsis, and if some of the effects seem ‘maladaptive’, so be it. The system was not built to handle that.
Perhaps nerve pain serves a purpose for the species rather than the individual. We’re a social animal that constantly observes other people. When we see somebody do something dangerous that permanently disables them, we can see the pain they endure and that makes us more likely to avoid imitating their action. Individuals suffer ongoing pain so they can serve as an ongoing warning to the group.
The nerve exists for perform a useful warning function, but like any process, it can be damaged or otherwise disrupted, and misbehave. Like an optical illusion, the eye evolved to provide data to the brain, but can give false signals as well as true ones when subjected to unusual circumstances.
I also have diabetic neuropathy in my feet and now sometimes in my hands. But I believe it has a purpose. It is an evil bitch that dares us to continue living, in spite of its torment and agonizing torture. It grimaces and drools and mocks us in our agony. It maniacally laughs at our suffering and promises to ramp up the pain until our merciful death. Oh yeah, it has a purpose. And in the long run it always wins.