Evolutionary psychiatry Flashcards
What is (Darwinian) ‘fitness’?
Measure of reproductive success
what is the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptness?
How traits that benefitted us in the anscetsral environment may be causing problems for us now
What is proximate and ultimate causation?
Proximate exlpanations describe the body’s mechanisms and how they works
Proximate - desccribe how those mechanisms came to be and why they are
Describe the table she shows us
6 reasons natural selection left us vulnerable to disease?
Mismatch - bodies unprepared to cope with modern environment
Infection - bacteria and viruses evolve faster than we do
Constraints - there are some things natural selection just can’t do
Tradeoffs - everything in the body has advantages and disadvantages
Reproduction - natural selection maximizes reproduction not health
Defensive responses - responses such as pain and anxiety are useful in the face of threats
Defensive responses?
Symptoms that cause you to do someting protective
pain, fever, nausea…
emotions: anxiety, jealousy, anger, low mood
Unpleasant but are useful
Doctors routinely prescribe drugs that block normal defense responses
What is mismatch?
Ancestral environment was very different to the current modern environment
Dopamine reward system
ultra-processed food triggers it - obesity epidemic, such a mismatch… vulnerability to addiction
substances that act on reward system receptors combine with novel ro
ADHD from an evolutionary point of view?
Pathologising ADHD symtoms that are a production of the environment?
What is the Smoke detector principle?
Explains a lot of useless anxiety
Smoke detectors often get false alarms because cost of not going off when there’s an actual fire is MUCH BIGGER
Cost of such responses low compared to the benefits of avoiding danger
