Any Evolutionary Advantage To Depression?
Why do we have depression? And I don’t mean about serotonin levels or bad childhoods or anything like that, but why would our bodies bother to make such a crippling disease in a large percentage of the population? What evolutionary advantage is there is having the most powerful species on the planet that get major depression or bipolar disorder?
Is The Planet Striking Back?
There’s one theory that mental illnesses is the way nature tries to reduce the human population. I’d try to find a link to this theory, but I’m too depressed to bother. We all have a lot of junk DNA in our cells that seemingly does nothing except wait around for circumstances to be exactly right before they kick into gear. Perhaps depression is a junk gene that kicks in only when the human population in a given area hits a certain point.
I don’t buy that theory, promarily because depression has been around for centuries (and possibly millenia) although it was called other names like melancholy or ennui. Just look at William Shakespeare’s most popular plays, Hamlet, and you see a textbook description of someone suffering from major depression.
Yet the human population has grown rather than shrunk after all of this time.
Evolution In Action
Another problem is that evolution doesn’t always make a species better in any way. Evolution does a lot of experiments and perhaps depression is one of those experiments. Some species have somehow hung on for millenia for no real known reason, such as the coelacanth, which is on the verge of extinction after 300 million years. I wonder if they’re depressed.
Could depression make some people better at survival skills or having empathy with others? I have no idea. What do you think?
April 4th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Beautiful .. Amazing …