Why didn't evolution make us happier

Great Debates
1

Happiness (happiness meaning contentment, feeling positive, well being, feeling good and at place, etc.) is tied into almost every positive character trait. It boosts the immune system, problem solving, motivation & socialbility, as well as various other traits that may or may not have mattered to hunter/gatherer humans.

http://thehappinessshow.com/HappinessBenefits.htm

Depression on the other hand weakens the immune system, makes someone less sociable, a bad problem solver and less motivated. Obvoiusly a depressed person would be at a severe disadvantage as far as darwinistic survival is concerned. So why aren’t people happier or less depressed? Did it just not matter enough to select these traits out of the population?

My understanding is that at any time about 10% of americans have major depression and about 20-30% have mild to moderate depression.

I guess we are somewhat happy. I’ve read adults are about the same as kids, feeling about 50% happy, 20% unhappy and 30% neutral during their lives.

http://thehappinessshow.com/HappiestCountries.htm

American Children feel happy 52 percent of the time, neutral 29 percent of the time, and unhappy 19 percent of the time.

2

Why should it? Evolution tends to foster strategies for survival and reproduction, not optimization of our overall emotional state.

In terms of survival and reproduction, we’re a very successful species. If we can succeed reproductively without being any happier than we are, there’s no evolutionary pressure towards increasing our happiness.

3

Couple of reasons:

  1. Unhappiness is of benefit to the species in many cases. For example, if you’re unhappy about not getting laid, you will go get some ass and propate the species.

  2. True, depression, like chronic pain, is of no benefit to anyone or anything on the level of natural selection. But natural selection is not a species-optimizing mechanism by any means.

That’s basically it. Unhappiness can be of benefit, and when it’s not it’s just like any other flaw or disadvantage in the species (the possibility of choking on food, the heart depending on easily-clogged arteries, etc.).

4

Evolution is not about the individual. It’s about weeding out the less fit.

Stress, in the times of our species’s foundation, was a useful thing. The presence of a predator or other danger causes outpouring of chemicals that produce the well-known “flight or fight” process, enabling us to avoid being something else’s lunch. The problem now is, of course, that the dangers around us all the time have little or nothing to do with running away or fighting, but the chemicals are produced all the same. In addition, in early times the danger was usually resolved by being avoided, or defeated, or by the individual’s death; either way, the stress chemicals stopped being produced. Today, the dangers we perceive persist for hours, days, weeks or longer, causing all kinds of mayhem.

As to why such body chemicals suppress the immune system: Well, if you’re about to be eaten by a tiger, you need all your body’s resources to avoid that, and there is no use at that moment for the immune system, let alone socialization or complex mental problem solving.

In a more philosophical vein, if we were not unhappy about bad things, we would not be trying to make them better. It’s GOOD that when we see awful things we feel sad.

Being depressed is not necessarily a barrier to reproduction, either, especially in times when most people did not have that long a life expectancy anyway. As long as you can survive to be the father or mother of a few surviving children, anything else is gravy.

5

Our ancestors didn’t have the time to be depressed. Depression is another “luxury” which has come about in the modern era.

People before the modern era didn’t have the expectations in life that we do today. They understood life to be hard and cruel. They expected harship and grief–a woman could expect that some of her children wouldn’t reach adulthood, as an example. A couple in a semi-arranged marriage didn’t expect love and passion-- they just hoped they’d get along amicably. They didn’t expect to have leisure time or even much recreation beyond the occasional “bee”-- and even that involved work.

Personally, I blame Hollywood/the media. We’re bombarded with images of happy, contented people and wonder why we’re not so carefree. The drudgery of daily life almost seems wrong. Television characters never scrub the toilet, or spend hours trying to sort out their bills, after all, and relationships in movies end with eternal happiness and endless passion once the “right” partner is located. We compare our lives with what we see, and some of us come to flat-out expect to be happy all the time, and that’s not reasonable.

We’re a culture built around guilt and envy. Envy of our neighbors’ posessions or lifestyle, envy of that product which makes the hair so shiny . . . We’re also programmed by advertising to feel guilty or ashamed for our natural flaws. It’s extremely effective-- we’re paranoid about our body’s odors, stray hairs, yellowing teeth and our weight and buy a lot of products to combat them. Our homes are expected to be immaculate and more sterile than most hospitals. The commercials hint that our neighbors will gossip about us in tones of shock and scorn if we do not comply. Our lawns must be weed-free and our cars innocent of road muck.

We spend our days in harshly-lit environments, hunched over desks, frantic to complete tasks which have little actual meaning, and then wonder why we feel so unfulfilled. We despise our jobs, but cling to them, hoping for a small raise which will enable us to buy the newest product which subtley promises domestic contentment while simultaneously threatening shame if not acquired.

At the end of the day, we rush home to clean our houses to meet some mental standard in leiu of spending time with our familes. When that is finished (or given up on) we cram down a processed meal, most likely while planted in front of the television which endlessly preaches that there are standards to which we must aspire but are failing miserably at achieving. The kids complete hours of homework to prepare them for state tests which have replaced actual learning, and then retire to their rooms to play video games which simulate human interaction without ever having to actually speak to someone.

Exhausted, we collapse into our beds, most likely too late in the evening, and then are awakened too early in the morning by the discordant screech of our alarm clocks so we can repeat the same, endless, monotonous cycle.

Evolution didn’t fuck up-- our society did.

6

I think that right about now is when we are evolving toward happiness actually.

7

I’m not quite sure what era you’re talking about, but you can find references to despair, melancholy, and malaise in the most ancient of texts.

8

While I understand your general point, I don’t like this sentence. I am sure that many people in the past didn’t have the expectation of happiness that causes angst or whatever you want to refer to it.

However, major depression is a medical problem that can shut down functions to the point of catatonia. It isn’t brought on by general maliase. There is no reason to believe it is a new condition.

9

Or a luxury.

10

Depression is tied into weakened immune systems, lack of interest in sex, poor socialbility and loss of appetite. All 4 would inhibit the survival of social creatures like humans. Happiness increases the immune system and socialibility and probably boosts libido as well as problem solving. The point is that happy people are at an evolutionary advantage, so they should have been the major survivors.

11

  1. Within reason I see your point. however unhappy people are worse at problem solving than happy people. A happy person with a problem will deal with it better than an unhappy person. In Martin Seligman’s book he discusses how optimistic people (optimism being a personality trait that is partially genetic and that is tied into happiness) deal with a diagnosis of cancer by trying to find cures. More pessimistic people just give up. So even in your situation the happy person will try to solve the problem, the depressed person will just give up.

  2. An impression I’m getting is that even though happiness and unhappiness affect our minds and bodies in ways that affect our survival, maybe the effect isn’t strong enough to actually matter. Depression may inhibit problem solving, immune function, reproduction and socialibility while happiness benefits these things, but maybe not to the degree that depressed people are less likely to survive and procreate.

12

I know. In fact in happiness research low standards is found to be one of the personality traits that leads to contentment. High standards lead to feeling inferior and incomplete. As an example

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040301-000002.html

But to imply that we aren’t prone to depression or that we aren’t as prone to happiness as we could be is wrong.

13

The most ancient of texts is just a blink of the eye when considered on the time scale of evolution. So, two questions:

Don’t you think our ancestors who had mates and were well fed were happier than those who didn’t? Perhaps unhappiness is greater now, since whatever genes we have for depression can spread without being cut off.

What is the gene or genes for happiness anyhow? Happiness in general might involve so many genes and so much of our environment that it won’t change very quickly.

And another - how do you measure unhappiness? Is that of a kid who didn’t get a new game for Christmas different in magnitude from one who is starving, or whose mother just died? Maybe we are pretty happy in general, after all.

14

My guesses:

  1. There are obvious evolutionary benefits to pursuing happiness. The intrinsic benefits of happiness per se are less clear (though see W.C.'s 10:03 post).

  2. I’m not sure what the evolutionary justification for stress reducing immunity is.

  3. Depression may have had benefits within the ancestral environment. Or rather, having certain social situations trigger feelings of neediness and submission may have helped when one lived in tribes of 30-80 members (WAG). For example we can’t all be alpha males, nor need we be. Presumably, there’s a distribution of proclivities to these sorts of triggers within the population.

  4. What Lissa said, except that I’ll note that there’s a lot to be said for modern medicine, relative to the offerings 100, 1000 or 10,000 years ago.
    I suspect that this might be a good topic for research. One start might be to choose a more skillful central term. Darrin McMahon argues that the very concept is a product of the 17th and 18th century enlightenment. Carlyle noted that this new doctrine tended to produce unrealistic expectations. Better to focus on ameliorating suffering, I say, though there are other approaches: my brother is a big advocate of exercise.

15

You’re confusing evolutionary perogatives with sociology. Very little of our social behavior can be explained in terms strictly defined by principles of natural selection; indeed, much of our socialization stands in contrast to strict selective pressures.

Evolution, and it’s primary mechanism, natural selection, don’t exist to “make us happier” or even to improve a species per se; it is an ex post facto explaination of why some species (or members within a species) predominate over others. To presume, even in implicit fashion, that there is any kind of specific purpose or goal in the ongoing evolutionary process–to be stronger, or more beautiful, or happier–leads to a blindness regarding the actual mechanism of natural selection; to wit, those with phenotypes best adapted to the current environment will tend to outpropagate the lesser-adapted species.

Happiness is a state of mind, one over which the individual (given a sufficiently supportive situation and lacking some inborn neurological disorder) has considerable control well and beyond anything explained by genetics.

Stranger

16

For the last three, it seems to me that a male may be signaling harmlessness to the group. And the last 2 seem like displays of submission for both genders.

I wonder how such traits exhibit themselves in monkeys or canines.

17

I’ve thought about the same thing as I watch nature shows where all of the animals in Africa mill about the watering hole knowing full well there are lions hanging out a little ways away, and my conclusion was that, despite the danger, the animals must be “happy/content” to the degree you can be happy when just trying to survive. If they are the opposite (depressed at their lot in life), then surely that would work against them, just as you are proposing with humans.

I also agree with Lissa, it’s more likely society and not evolution that is causing an increase in depression. I don’t think we are living in societies/environments that match those we evolved in. IIRC, studies of “less advanced” populations tend to show a higher degree of happiness, which I would attribute to a sense of community, structure in one’s life, not as many transient relationships, etc.

18

Yes, but evolution never had to prepare us for life in modern America. So much has changed over the last 10,000 years, and evolution hasn’t kept up. We have to deal with a lot.

If you look at really primitive societies, they usually seem pretty happy to me. At least judging by the National Geographics I used to read.

100,000 years ago humans might actually have been pretty happy. People seem to like hunting and fishing and gardening. They’re considered nice, relaxing pastimes. I know lots of women who like cooking and knitting and weaving etc. As a man, I actually enjoy some of that stuff too. What if that’s all we had to do all day?

“What are you doing today Onk?”
“Oh I dunno. Maybe a little huntin’, a little fishin’, maybe weave a basket. Wanna go with, or did you need me to help with that canoe you’re building?”

It’d be more work having to do it all the time, but people can live hard lives and still be happy.

It’s modern stresses that make people depressed. It’s an illness. It’s like asking “why didn’t evolution make us illness free?” It can’t anticipate everything.

19

Happiness can lead to complacency; dissatisfaction leads to pro-active survival. - What kind of organism is more likely to survive; one that is doing nothing much, because it has everything it needs, or one whose desires cause it to compete for resources etc?

“Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen”

20

Happiness is about 50% genetic. And happiness offers several evolutionary benefits over unhappiness and depression. As an example, a happy person will be alot more likely to try to evade a predator than a sucidially depressed person who doesn’t want to live, who is physically weak, who has a weakened immune system and who isn’t good at problem solving.