Nesse argues that psychiatry requires both proximate and evolutionary explanations to become a fully fledged biological science. He thinks that mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression would benefit from posing the question of whether low mood and variable social ability were adaptive traits in times long gone and are no longer of evolutionary advantage in our current environment.I think that Nesse's approach is as laudable as it is flawed. Evolutionary psychology proposes that most if not all human psychological traits are complex adaptations which have evolved under selective pressures. Richardson convincingly shows that the claim that all our psychological capacities have been selected for the purpose of accomplishing a particular task is too strong and that the empirical evidence required to support this claim is necessarily historical. The problem is, however, that the required historical evidence is hard or impossible to come by - we simply do not know what psychological traits were prevalent let alone advantageous to survive in a Pleistocene environment about which we also have little information.
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