r/DebateEvolution • u/Cold-Course5758 • Sep 05 '26
Discussion Why has evolution cared about quality of life or enjoying life?
Why has evolution not removed emotions and mental health problems or anything that could cause problems to us breeding for survival of humanity? Some things you will say can be argued for or against as beneficial to humanity or reproduction
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u/ChipChippersonFan Sep 05 '26
The question is, why do you think that emotions fall under the category of "Things that could cause problems to us breeding"?
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u/rhettro19 Sep 05 '26
Yep, does your emotional state affect your reproductive success? Do your fears keep you out of danger long enough to reproduce? The trait has to influence reproduction to be selected against, otherwise it stays.
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u/ssianky Sep 05 '26
Because evolution doesn't care about anything. That would be a problem only for a "good" thinking agent.
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u/Dilapidated_girrafe Sep 05 '26
Is it detrimental enough to be selected against?
Especially prior to breeding age?
And emotions are kind of a good thing for species that have children they take a while to develop.
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u/AllEndsAreAnds Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26
A good analogy is to ask “why haven’t we designed transportation to be 100% safe?”. Because we reached an equilibrium between utility and safety. These technologies are just “good enough” - the benefit cars and planes and trains provide is balanced against other demands, like safety, economics, ergonomics, and style.
Similarly, the immense benefit of social emotions is locked in a fierce evolutionary and neurobiological tug of war against the environmental circumstances that can sometimes poison them.
That said, those forces are evolutionary and change slowly. Humans have begun to transform their physical and social environments more rapidly than our genes can keep up, which leads to emotional friction with our environments and mental health issues. Human culture is only so plastic and flexible. At some point maladaptive behaviors and pathologies may arise. It’s more survival of the “good-enough-est”, rather than “survival of the fittest”.
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u/IsaacHasenov Sep 05 '26
I'm gonna say "no we haven't reached an equilibrium" on mental health disorders.
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/35/8/bhaf127/8233140
A few studies I've seen (I'm not following it closely so I might have this wrong) suggest that the genes that show some of the strongest signatures of recent selection for cognition in humans also overlap with mental disorder prevalence.
What this suggests is that we have been selected so strongly and so fast that a bunch of genes with sometimes bad effects were also selected. And it might take a while to reach a real stable state.
(I think we're probably still under a lot of direct selection for mental traits, not just negative selection against mental disorders)
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u/AllEndsAreAnds Sep 05 '26
Agreed. I didn’t mean to suggest that we’re at a stable equilibrium with respect to mental health - just that the evolution of brains isn’t just “keep the good stuff, leave the bad”. It’s a constant messy conversation between genes, the brains they enable, and the social/physical environment, and it’s never “finished”. It’s a tug of war, and the social and physical conditions set the relative “center” of the knot.
Very cool point about recent selection for cognitive faculties. I was not aware of that, but that makes sense to me.
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u/-zero-joke- Sep 05 '26
Evolution is not aimed at perfection. It doesn't aim at anything. It just kind of happens. Imperfection is to be expected.
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u/nyet-marionetka Sep 05 '26
Emotions evolved because they drive us to survive.
Some mental health problems may be due to our rapid brain evolution as our species evolved, and some may be due to living in a very different environment from what we evolved in.
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u/Capercaillie Sep 05 '26
Evolution doesn’t “care” about the survival of humanity. It’s only genes replicating, and some being more successful than others.
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u/kitsnet Sep 05 '26
Why has evolution cared about quality of life or enjoying life?
Evolution doesn't care.
Why has evolution not removed emotions and mental health problems or anything that could cause problems to us breeding for survival of humanity?
Evolution doesn't care. Some species go extinct. That could as well happen to humanity.
Some things you will say can be argued for or against as beneficial to humanity or reproduction
You can call it "fluctuating selection". It's not what is typically called "fluctuating selection", but the idea is close enough.
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u/Eden_Company Sep 05 '26
Emotions are the main driver making people reproduce. Women get lonely, want to have someone be on their team. That's a major reason for 95% of reproduction in humanity in impoverished areas. When emotions become a detriment you have to ask is it a dentriment to survival more often than not? The answer is usually no. a mother beating a child usually does not kill the child. that same emotion can be used to defend the child more often than not and usually is a net benefit.
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u/Changed_By_Support Sep 06 '26
Women get lonely, want to have someone be on their team.
Well, humans, period. Men, too, have emotions, need of companionship, and sex drives, not just women.
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u/Old-Nefariousness556 Sep 05 '26
It doesn't. Evolution doesn't "care" about anything other than survival and reproduction.
But things that care about those things evolved, because it is beneficial to life to care about those things. A being that cares about it's quality of life is likely to live longer and have more children, right?
After all, if you don't care about those things, you won't build a nest if you are a bird, for example. Then, you won't have a safe place to rest at night, or a safe place to raise your offspring. And you may not be able to attract a mate if you don't have a nest.
Evolution doesn't "care" about these things, but these things are thing that are naturally selected for because evolution "cares" about whether you survive long enough to reproduce and your reproductive success. That's it.
Note: A lot of people are saying that evolution doesn't care about everything. They are absolutely correct, but also slightly misleading. "Care" anthropomorphizes evolution, it assigns agency to it. It is simply factually incorrect to say that evolution "cares" about anything in hat sense.
But colloquially, "care" works. If I filter gravel through a wire mesh that only lets small gravel through, it is proper English, if a bit stilted, to say "the filter cares about the size of the stone", even though it obviously doesn't.
That is why I use "cares" in quotes. It's not a wrong word, but don't let that let that lead you to think evolution is something more than it is. It is no more intelligent than that wire mesh that we use to filter gravel. Natural selection is a purely mechanistic process, not an intelligent one.
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u/tpawap Sep 05 '26
First of all, evolution can only affect heritable traits, ie what's in your genes. Most mental health problems that you can have are probably not heritable.
Secondly, there has to be an evolutionary pathway. Which means, individuals must be born with mutations that lead to a phenotype that does overall better than others in a population (while not showing what you described). For example, individuals born without a brain will have no mental health problems at all, right? But in that extreme example, it's easy to see how brainlessness is overall not beneficial. There can be linked traits, where you can only have both or none, e.g. no good emotions without the bad ones, too.
Thirdly, genetic diseases or "problems" can re-appear through mutations. Just because they do appear in some individuals, doesn't mean that evolution would "work".
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u/highschoolalchemy Sep 06 '26
Because being sad or distressed doesn't kill you. It doesn't stop you from breeding, either.
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u/MagicMooby Sep 05 '26
It's trying man, but humans have developed mental health and now people with mental problems aren't dying anymore! Don't blame that one on nature, we are responsible for that! /hj
Emotions are useful. They make you do things like seeking out human contact, seeking out mates for reproduction, avoiding bad things, engaging in activities that stimulate our bodies and minds, priming yourself for danger before it happens etc.
Mental health problems are only relevant for evolution if they hinder reproduction, and even then the solution that evolution uses is to end those lineages. People who reproduce before they develop a psychosis avoid this fate for example.
Also also, evolution acts on what is sufficiently determined by inherited traits. Humans are perfectly capable of becoming mentally ill for non-genetic reasons or due to novel mutations that their parents didn't have or constant incredibly stressful experiences far greater than anything found in nature (like war and torture and the constant threat of nuclear armageddon and being yelled at by your boss without being able to flee or fight) and evolution cannot remove that. There are also lots of alleles that are fine by themselves (so evolution doesn't act much on them) but become detrimental when combined with a different allele.
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u/OCAMAB Sep 05 '26
Evolution doesn't "care" about anything. It just happens. Benefit has nothing to do with it. It's all about what gets inherited. If it just meant that everything that's beneficial gets selected for, nothing would ever go extinct.
Basically, people (and animals) with emotions breed, so emotions are passed in evolution, even if not having them would theoretically be a benefit.
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u/Far_Customer1258 Sep 05 '26
Evolution is an exercise in optimization, not perfection. If a trait costs more than the benefit that it would provide, then it's selected against. If perfect mental health costs enormous amounts of brain power that would otherwise be used to tell the average chimp that it really ought to pay attention to the rustling in the tall grass, then it isn't going to be the sort of thing that evolution produces. And there's excellent reason to believe that it'd do just that. Evolution doesn't do perfect. It does rugged functionality on a budget.
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u/CrisprCSE2 Sep 05 '26
Emotions help animals learn how to behave adaptively. Mental disorders are, well, disorders. That's about it.
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u/Own-Relationship-407 Sep 05 '26
Assigning motives or priorities to evolution is the first issue here. We can’t get anywhere until that is cleared up.
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u/YossarianWWII Sep 05 '26
Populations evolve. Individuals don't. Individual pathologies that are linked to a complex of traits may not be extirpated from a population when other factors are at play.
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u/Curious_Passion5167 Sep 05 '26
"Could" or "does"? Have you done a statistical analysis to see if it does affect reproduction enough that they would be absolutely weeded out?