An evolutionary psychiatrist claims that natural selection selects for mental illness:
Randolph Nesse, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, attributes high rates of psychiatric disorders to natural selection operating on our genes without paying heed to our emotional well-being. What’s more, the selective processes took place thousands of years before the unique stresses of modern urban existence, leading to a mismatch between our current environment and the one for which we were
adapted .In his new book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, Nesse recruits the framework of evolutionary medicine to make a case for why psychiatric disorders persist despite their debilitating consequences. Some conditions, like depression and anxiety, may have developed from normal, advantageous emotions. Others, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, result from genetic mutations that may have been beneficial in less extreme manifestations of a trait. Scientific American spoke to Nesse about viewing psychiatry through an evolutionary lens to help both patients and clinicians. Dana G. Smith, “Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt over the Millennia” at Scientific American
But, of course, Michael Behe’s point in Darwin Devolves is that natural selection primarily breaks or blunts complex things, resulting in survival at a cost. Sounds like Dr. Nesse is saying the same thing, not that he would admit it.
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See also: A review of Darwin Devolves that looks at what Behe actually says
and
Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented?
So what I’m reading here is that things like depression and anxiety schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are just malfunctions and over reactions Of past normal emotions that helped us survive in the past?
Does he know what he saying he’s pretty much saying that these disorders are defective versions of one’s normal emotions. Another words he is saying that the disorders are disorders of emotions we already had. So there disorders. So when these emotions aren’t malfunctioning they provide a survival benefit correct. So pretty much if you’re feeling normal you have a survival advantage because your emotions are under control and their normal so he’s pretty much talking out of his ass trying to use evolutionary psychology to explain s**t that is defective. Yay for evolutionary psychology the ability to explain anything for any reason and it always have an evolutionary benefit because everything in this world it’s just the illusion of design
I tend to look at these things as variation from the Mean. Once you’ve got 100 million (let alone 5 billion) instances of something, you start getting noticeable numbers of individuals 6 or 8 standard deviations below (and above) Normal. So in a country with several hundred million individuals, you gotta expect a noticeable number of freaks and psychopaths.
In “primitive” societies where you have perhaps 50 members in the manpack (half of whom are below the age of 15), an individual who “sees things” that others do NOT see might be viewed as a saint. And an individual who is openly antisocial and demonstrates it will get his head bashed in by the Tribal Elders. So strangers from over the hill who drop by whilst tracking a herd of wildebeest or something would see only a bunch of normal Joes who have some odd habit like eating their veggies before they savor today’s scraps of meat.
Weirdos would of course find it harder to attract a mate.
AaronS1978 at 1 and VMahuna at 2, all worth reflection. But if Dr. Nesse is right, he is demonstrating the power of natural selection to “break or blunt,” as Behe argues. Then how did the intricate, incomprehensible system of the mind itself come into being? Probably not that way.
Belief in Darwinism itself is a primary source of mental illness. If the billion-trillion proteins dedicated to the singular purposeful task of keeping a person alive for precisely a lifetime and not a moment longer (Talbott) does not constitute an irrefutably powerful inference to ‘top down’ design, i.e. to seeing the ‘purposeful arrangement of parts’, then all reason is lost and the atheist is drifting about in an Alice in Wonderland world of profound insanity.
Don’t take Design proponents word for it, Darwinists themselves admit that they have ‘lost their minds’.
For prime example of this insanity inherent in the Atheist’s worldview, a supposed “expert” on the philosophy of mind, after much conscious thought, decides there is no such thing as conscious thought. 🙂 i.e. Decides that he does not have a mind.
The claim from Darwinists that consciousness is an illusion is simply insane. As David Bentley Hart states, “Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it.”
Furthermore, the claim from Darwinists that their conscious mind is merely an illusion undermines any and all explanations that they may have for anything else. In fact, the denial of mind renders all their other explanations for anything else illusory. As Maverick Philosopher states, “Consciousness is not only presupposed by the distinction between reality and illusion, it is also presupposed by the quest for explanation. For where would explanations reside if not in the minds of conscious beings?”
It is humorous to see how the claim that consciousness is an illusion plays out in the Atheist’s attempt to explain the world at large:
Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, and indeed more antagonistic to sanity itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
As should be needless to say, this denial of reality itself, via the denial of the reality of his own mind, has some rather drastic negative impacts on the Darwinian atheist:
As Professor Andrew Sims, former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, states, “The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally.”,,, “In the majority of studies, religious involvement is correlated with well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life;,,”
In fact, in the following study it was found that, “those middle-aged adults who go to church, synagogues, mosques or other houses of worship reduce their mortality risk by 55%.”
It is easy to see why Darwinian Atheists suffer much more, both mentally and physically, than Theists do. Atheism undermines any claim that our lives can have any true meaning, value or purpose, in the first place. And as such entails a nihilistic view of reality where everything in our lives becomes utterly pointless.
Thus in conclusion, from simply the practical point of view of living a healthier life, both mentally and physically, the Atheist ought to rightly reject his insane atheism and adopt Christianity.
In drug abuse, addicts will persist with what is a demonstrably harmful behavior because it makes them feel good and that sense of well-being is worth more to them than almost anything else. Marx described religion as the opium of the people for much the same reason. Could religious belief be viewed as a form of psychiatric disorder because the perceived benefits outweigh any harmful effects in the minds of its adherents?
If there wasn’t such overwhelming evidence for the existence of an Intelligent Designer, yes.
Unfortunately, for you, materialism is a non-starter
Just Splendid. Seversky, quotes Marx, whose atheistic Communist philosophy for society was given a supposedly ‘scientific footing’ directly from Darwinism:
Marx’s atheistic philosophy for society, i.e. Communism, has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths.
And yet, despite such unmitigated horror, somehow Seversky finds Marx a worthy authority to quote from in regards to religion?
And Seversky does this to somehow try to prove that atheism is not insane???
You just can’t make this stuff up! In case you had not noticed Seversky, quoting Marx as an authority for anything is itself INSANE!
One of the chief attributes of many drug addicts is what is termed ‘denialism’. i.e. The refusal to deal with reality as it really is.
If any mental illness ever described Darwinists denialism is certainly it.
Studies establish that the design inference is ‘knee jerk’ inference that is built into everyone, especially including atheists, and that atheists have to mentally work suppressing their “knee jerk” design inference!
Perhaps the two most famous quotes of atheists suppressing their innate ‘design inference’ are the following two quotes:
First off, contrary to what Dawkins stated, natural selection certainly does NOT explain the “appearance of design”
Secondly, when just looking at a cross section of DNA, even before getting into the astonishing multiple overlapping coding within DNA, it is easy to see why Crick stated that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”
Thus in conclusion, the Christian is well justified in trusting his intuition that the world is Designed. And the Atheists is found to be artificially, and without empirical warrant, suppressing, i.e. living in denial of, that same intuition in Design.
As molecular biologist Doug Axe stated in his book “Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed”, “Our intuition was right all along.”
In conclusion, it is not that Atheists do not see purpose and/or Design in nature, it is that Atheists, for whatever severely misguided reason, live in denial of the purpose and/or Design that they themselves see in nature.
I hold the preceding to be confirming evidence for Romans1:19-20
And as mentioned in post 4, the consequences for atheists living in denial of reality, much like the drug addict, are devastating both mentally and physically.
Bornagain77 @ 8
Marx published in 1848, Darwin in 1859, so it’s nonsense to argue that Marx was inspired by Darwin. That he and Engels thought that Darwin’s theory could be co-opted to provide scientific support for their political ideology doesn’t say anything about evolution’s scientific standing.
So have the world’s religions over the millennia.
Only in the sense that his “opium” quote makes a good point. Here it is again in full:
Sounds like he’d actually have made a pretty good theologian if he’d been one of the faithful.
Did somebody prove atheism is insane when I wasn’t looking?
Repetition doesn’t prove anything either – even in caps.
Atheists recognize the appearance of design in Nature. They also recognize it as having the appearance of design because it looks like stuff that we design. Would we so easily recognize the designs of some more advanced alien intelligence? Even more, why would an all-powerful and all-knowing God that has existed for all eternity design in a way similar to that of humans of the last couple of centuries? As Hume argued, design is evidence of constraint so how can it be evidence of a being whose powers are effectively unconstrained?
Seversky states,
First, Darwinism, especially since Darwinists themselves refuse to accept any reasonable falsification criteria for their “theory”, does not even qualify as a testable scientific theory in the first place, but is more realistically classified as a unfalsifiable pseudoscientific religion for atheists:
Second, that the atheistic amorality inherent in Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ provides “scientific standing” for the atheistic amorality inherent in Marx’s ‘class struggle’ and Hitler’s struggle between races, is fairly straight forward. Darwin provided an amoral origin’s myth with ‘survival of the fittest’ that is completely antithetical for a productive society at large since it directly undermines the golden rule of ‘loving your neighbor as yourself’ which is absolutely essential for a healthy society.
Moreover, that ‘survival of the fittest’ amorality would be such a failure when applied to human society at large is actually another ‘scientific proof’ that evolution must be false as a worldview since it fails so drastically as a overarching governing worldview for societies at large:
Seversky then tries to rationalize away the unmitigated horror of the hundreds of millions of deaths at the hands of Communism/Socialism by saying “So have the world’s religions over the millennia.”
I beg to differ, whereas Muslims and other religions may be said to be somewhat comparable to the unmitigated horror witnessed in Communism’s ‘atheism unleashed’, Christianity has been the source of many blessings for the world and for the common man, i.e. Universities, Hospitals, Representative Government, Abolition of Slavery, Elevation of Women, Modern Science, etc..
Seversky then quotes Marx’s ‘opium of the masses’ quote in full as if Marx’x extended ramblings against religion somehow justifies Seversky’s initial insanity of quoting Marx in the first place. ,,, You just can’t make this stuff up. Perhaps Seversky will next start quoting extended passages from Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book?
Seversky then asks, “Did somebody prove atheism is insane when I wasn’t looking?”
Yes, atheists themselves have proved atheism is insane. Apparently you did not read post 4 too carefully.
Seversky then again takes exception to me reiterating the fact that for him to quote Marx as an authority on anything is INSANE. Seversky says it is ‘repetition’. But alas, grade school children learn many things through repetition. Yet, one seriously wonders whether Seversky will ever make it out of the grade school of what is self evidently true since he either refuses to, or simply can not, learn anything.
Seversky then truthfully admits that “Atheists recognize the appearance of design in Nature”, but then Seversky immediately tries to rationalize the ‘appearance of design’ away by saying something along the lines that the designer could be so advanced that we would not be able to recognize his and/or their design. And exactly how does that possibly explain what Seversky himself honestly admitted clearly appears to be designed. By Seversky’s own criteria, Seversky has now rendered his own arguments against Design null and void since he can now never recognize whether something was Designed or not. i.e. His argument is non sequitur Hogwash!
I think that many mental disorders are just adaptive functions carried to the extreme. For example, OCD in its weakest form is nothing more than what we refer to as muscle memory.