March 05, 2010
Is Depression an Adaptation?
Lindsay Beyerstein over at her new blog Focal Point:
Jonah Lehrer argues in the New York Times Magazine that depression might be good for us. He's popularizing a theory advanced by two Virginia researchers who claim that depression is an adaptive mechanism that compels us to withdraw from the world and focus intently on our problems.
The fact that depression is so common strikes him as an evolutionary paradox. About 7 percent of adults will experience some depression in any given year, according to Lehrer's statistics. We know that at least some kinds depression have a heritable component, i.e., that genes help explain why depression strikes some and not others. At first glance, depression seems obviously detrimental to fitness. Every classic symptom seems to hurt a sufferer's chances of passing on her genes: Depression saps productivity and decreases mental accuity. Depressed people lose interest in food, socializing, and even sex. Depressed parents may struggle to care for their children. Hardly a recipe for fitness. So, why did such terrible genes persist?
But Lehrer thinks he sees a silver lining:
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.
Lehrer is arguing for an evolutionary take on the so-called analytical rumination model of depression.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:58 PM | Permalink
Comments
Almost anyone can benefit from introspection, and depression may well be an adaptation to fill that need. But implying that "depression is good for you" is like telling the mother of a child with sickle cell anemia that she should celebrate because at least the child is resistant to malaria.
Out of control depression makes life hell. You're damn right I take medication for it.
Posted by: krs | Mar 5, 2010 1:12:24 PM
Like many supposedly "mental" problems, I think depression is a state of being, not just mind. This is what modern brain science misses. I wrote about this article myself from a very different perspective. I guess people have a hard time with different perspectives, particularly those that challenged cherished notions about our modern "godhead" (i.e. neuroscience).
Posted by: The Necromancer | Mar 5, 2010 1:25:17 PM
While suffering is both necessary and natural -- and necessary because natural -- the observation Freud made almost a century ago about what treatment is for still holds. Treatment is for the alleviation of unnecessary suffering, he said. It was never supposed to be about eliminating suffering.
It is true that pain can be instructive and motivating. But doesn't that work best as an early warning system? If your sleeve catches fire, it's as well to feel it, since not feeling it would cause greater injury.
Anna Akhmatova had to be unhappily in love or the poetry wouldn't come. One can sympathize. If poetry was her most real objective, however, the pain she needed to bring it forth was not unnecessary suffering.
We want to find meaning in torment, to believe that suffering is redemptive. I think this is our way of recognizing there is no way out of it. But how much is too much? I would rather the individual, not a philosophy, decided.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 5, 2010 1:50:26 PM
I recently read a very interesting article by Michael Vincent Miller, that discusses his view that many people who feel that they are depressed are actually simply disappointed. He goes on to explain that the effects can be very difficult, and a key is doing something about dealing with life after disappointment.
It changed my life, re-organizing a whole series of experiences dating back a few years.
I thought I was depressed, but knew deep down that I'm just not a depressed kind of guy; so what I was really experiencing was "Disappointment" - which is something that I CAN deal with.
Like taking the wrong medicine for a mis-diagnosed illness.
Just throwing that out there for anyone clicking on the article looking for relief from what they think is depression.
I originally found the article link on CNN linking to Oprah.com
While writing this I googled his name and easily found a link to the article.
Highly recommended reading!
Posted by: odysseus14 | Mar 5, 2010 2:00:38 PM
Though I support examining the problem from this kind of perspective, I don't think that overwhelming conclusions can be drawn from this methodology. We have no concrete information on how prevalent depression was in the population until recently. It is also difficult to diagnose and co-occurrent with other disorders. Additionally, more and more information is emerging supporting the idea that depression is more common in more developed societies. So it is entirely probable that depression at its currents levels is a product of modernity, and not a millenia-old adaptation.
Posted by: westwood | Mar 5, 2010 2:11:08 PM
The dead hand of evolutionary psychology, yet again. This time with a massive contradiction: I thought we were depressed because our minds were selected during the Pleistocene era and we no longer live as cave men. (If you think I'm kidding, take a look at the work of Steve Ilardi.) But according to this article, we are depressed because depression was actually selected. Hamlet among the hunter gatherers. Well, you EP guys, which is it?
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 5, 2010 3:12:00 PM
Evolutionary psychology needs to die a slow, painful death. Theories that inherently cannot be tested are not science; they're philosophy masquerading as science. It's not simply that this particular theory of depression is wrong. Rather, the basic premise on which the theory is based—that behavioral psychopathology can be understood in evolutionary terms, without reference to the underlying biology—is absurd. It's not even wrong, just wholly misguided.
Not everything is an adaptation. Natural selection routinely produces phenotypes that are not apparently beneficial, logical, or meaningful. It's only in aggregate that traits affect the reproductive success of a species.
For the relevant and now-classic academic bitch-slap to adaptationalists, see Gould & Lewontin, 1979, "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm".
An adaptationalist perspective is even less well-suited to understanding social organisms, because in that case, natural selection is working on both the individual and group levels simultaneously. What seems like a maladaptive trait for an individual may in fact benefit the group as a whole, or vice versa. More importantly, the way in which the various biological and cultural factors interact is rarely, if ever, going to be clear or intuitive. Trying to delineate these variables through inductive reasoning alone is a fool's game.
Posted by: Neurosloth | Mar 5, 2010 3:13:55 PM
This a bit like going in circles chasing one’s tail.
If depression had any survival value then it should not had been as a paralyzing affect that robs the victim of all effective initiative.
Viewed in this fashion, depression was not the symptom that conferred the adaptive benefits to the sufferer, but instead it was the capacity to thrive under the pain of adversity that did it.
That type of endurance is the one described by David Maybury-Lewis in his book Millennium as part of the Mandan Okeepas ceremonies to choose their leaders.
Meanwhile. Let’s admit that it’s nice that this 'exaptation' can be treated efficiently.
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | Mar 5, 2010 6:09:31 PM
As Lucy Van Pelt, psychiatrist, says, "Snap out of it!"
Posted by: Philip Graham | Mar 5, 2010 7:06:08 PM
I agree that EP, here and in general, is pretty useless -and for the reasons that many commentators have so eloquently stated. But I'd add that EP here isn't 'philosophy masquerading as science' -no decent philosopher would (should, anyway) tolerate the non sequiters and post hoc, propter hoc reasoning EP so richly displays.
Too many anecdotes and 'just so' stories calling themselves science. Still, I suppose the fashionability of this tosh will ebb in the end....
Posted by: Chris Horner | Mar 5, 2010 7:30:27 PM
Yes! Depression causes us to withdraw from the world and to focus inwardly. That is exactly what Abe Lincoln did...oh, except for focusing from time to time on a civil war.
Posted by: fred lapides | Mar 5, 2010 8:45:50 PM
For the relevant and now-classic academic bitch-slap to adaptationalists, see Gould & Lewontin, 1979, "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm".
As a fellow Marxist, I was rooting for the Gould/Lewontin/Rose team over Dawkins/Dennett/Wilson/Pinker, but I had to materially face reality, and conceded defeat.
Ideology comes in second this time.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 5, 2010 10:43:53 PM
I'm still with Gould et al. I'm not at all clear that their view has been defeated.
Posted by: Chris Horner | Mar 6, 2010 6:07:11 AM
I'm not sure that Gould et al lost either (and I'm no Marxist), or if they did that they lost for the right reasons. The Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson, Pinker crew told the story that the press wanted to hear. It's much easier to sell a story saying "everything is an adaptation!" than to get anyone interested in "you know, it's really quite complicated."
Between "adapatation!" and "it's complicated," "adapatation!" wins every time. Sad, really.
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 6, 2010 9:57:10 AM
Arundhati Roy once wrote, Never simplify what is complex, or complicate what is simple. If only.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 6, 2010 11:37:42 AM
I think depression is related to consciousness. What is depression, but the feeling that "I cannot continue in this fashion." This and other "pain" systems ask us to look for--to see--something, so that we can make changes. What gets missed, I don't wonder, is the identification of "this." As one commenter suggests, developed societies are more prone to depression, and perhaps this is because there is something that is not life-sustaining, or perhaps soul-sustaining about modern societies. Depression is, then, a mechanism that helps us identify cultural or societal features--beliefs, let's say--that are not worth pursuing, not worth continued investment. And, once identified, one can consciously change them.
Posted by: lambness | Mar 6, 2010 12:38:31 PM
lambness, great to see you! I agree, the cost of First World refinements may be soul sickness. This is not because we're "covered for the basics" and so can afford the luxury of anguish, but because there is a high psychic cost to our way of life. We are undermining ourselves, and deeply know it.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 6, 2010 1:15:04 PM
Elatia, you're always so welcoming! I hope to meet you in person someday.
And, per this thread...it troubles me how quickly science-ists dismiss the experiential forms of wisdom. Does not science also inform us that there is no effect without cause? The depressed person who asks "Why am I such a loser?" may be indulging in self-pity, AND the question may be a fair and reasonable one--it asks the self to question the notion itself, and could be slightly rephrased to say, "Where does this idea that I'm a loser come from?" It asks us to examine the underpinnings we have internalized. How else do we learn to make new choices, except by becoming conscious to them?
Posted by: lambness | Mar 6, 2010 1:35:14 PM
I have a proposal. We include, on the census, the following question:
"27. DO YOU THINK THERE IS OR COULD EVER BE SUCH THINGS AS 'DEPRESSION GENES'? (Y / N /Don't know)"
We take everyone who circles "Y" and ship them off to an uninhabited island in the south pacific. There, they can live out their idiotic little lives and the rest of us can get on with things.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Mar 6, 2010 2:17:42 PM
Oh, and Neurosloth, with all due respect, please don't call this "philosophy". You could not construct a greater insult to philosophers if you tried.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Mar 6, 2010 2:20:13 PM
I kind of want to get up in Lehrer's grill about this--he really should know better (in what universe is depression "clarifying"?). But I'm struck that he seems to have no defenders, at least not here. Are the populi, if not the cognoscenti, finally starting to see this kind of ev psych as the phlogiston it is?
7 percent of "us" (does Jonah mean Americans?) will experience depression in a given year, and that, I suppose, needs some kind of explanation. Meanwhile 20 percent of the world's population live in slums. Perhaps that's also an adaptation?
There's one sense in which Lehrer is right. Depression, in many cases, a symptom of something important that we may not want to drown out with medications. But that something important is certainly not the subject of our ruminations.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Mar 6, 2010 3:19:39 PM
Well then, Chris, of what IS depression an important symptom?
Posted by: lambness | Mar 6, 2010 3:55:31 PM
Lambness,
I didn't mean to give the impression that it is easy to generalize about such a thing. And I am by no means an expert in the field.
But I do take the unfashionable view that depression is--often--a mask for emotional states that are felt to be unexpressable (as opposed to inexpressible), for a variety of reasons. Anger, sadness, and fear, and their subspecies, for example.
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Mar 6, 2010 5:45:20 PM
Have Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson, Pinker ever said that "everything's an adaptation" or "it's not complicated"?
Posted by: billy | Mar 6, 2010 7:21:19 PM
Have Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson, Pinker ever said that "everything's an adaptation" or "it's not complicated"?
Of course not, but it simplifies the story for our challenged friends.
Anyone paying attention, is probably freighted and depressed.
I would worry about them if they are not.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 6, 2010 8:22:52 PM
Yes, Dave -- we should come out. Oh, I know! I'M only here because I have a very close friend who gets depressed... As to the rest of you people...
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Mar 6, 2010 8:26:22 PM
“If depression was rare in the ancestral condition, and the capacity for introspection was beneficial, then there’s no evolutionary mystery to solve.”
This argument reminds me of the false view that the dark skin in sun drenched latitudes is an adaptation to reduce deadly skin cancer. White skin would not have the adaptive property of reduced skin cancer. The problem with this view is that by the time one is old enough to develop skin cancer, the time for fertility and procreation is largely past.
A better argument is one based on sexual selection, though this has not been demonstrated.
The same argument would apply to depression. If there were an adaptive value to depression, it would have to be manifest very early and be important in reproduction or sexual selection.
“Gee, I’m really turned on by that sad chick/hunk over there. I think I’ll mate with the saddest person here.”
I don’t think the argument works. Also, depression is not depression is not depression is not depression. There are different types of depression: deep depression, reactive depression, dysthymia (chronic low grade depression), transitional depression, grief related depression, the ‘blues’, etc.
Posted by: Norman Costa | Mar 6, 2010 8:32:02 PM
Nick,
I'm not sure establishing census-form leper colonies is a good idea. It may be too similar to some earlier notions that sprang forth from Cold Spring Harbor -- those wonderful folks who gave you eugenics:
Dot Org
Edwin Black
I believe the other commentators here may be suffering from Recalcitrant Contrarian Disorder-Depressive Type 2. Please take two serotonin reuptake inhibitors immediately for efficient treatment. If you're not happy in the morning, call the doctor.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Mar 7, 2010 12:01:12 AM
"Have Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson, Pinker ever said that 'everything's an adaptation' or 'it's not complicated'?"
Yes, in fact they have. The whole point of EP was gradualism and selection as a history of the mind, with the goal to discover discrete, functional modules designed for one or the other adaptive role. The direct line to the major media--through Nicholas Wade for example--is the news flash "x phenomena--obesity, depression, killing step children, what have you, turns out to be an adaptation."
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 7, 2010 11:47:11 AM
"Yes, in fact they have." A quote, please?
"The direct line to the major media..." That reporters misinterpret or exaggerate their theories or results is something not unique to EP.
Posted by: billy | Mar 7, 2010 1:29:02 PM
'The whole point of EP was gradualism and selection as a history of the mind, with the goal to discover discrete, functional modules designed for one or the other adaptive role.'
Gradualism? Please read the science.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 7, 2010 5:31:08 PM
Dave,
I've read the science thank you. What do you object to in the term gradualism, that it was coined by Gould? Or do you think that punctuated equilibrium was right after all? When I say that the EP crowd says "everything" is an adaptation I'm using a shorthand for saying on the EP model of the mind-in the classic form of Cosmides and Tooby, for example (have *you* read them?)--views the mind as a massively modular system designed to solve a massive array of adaptation problems.
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 7, 2010 10:15:18 PM
No, I'm with Gould on punctuated equilibrium, although it is not what most believe it is.
I don't think anyone has a Lyle like view of slow , gradual change.
When I say that the EP crowd says "everything" is an adaptation I'm using a shorthand for saying on the EP model of the mind-in the classic form of Cosmides and Tooby
You shouldn't, as it is narrow, and not representative.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 7, 2010 11:14:45 PM
Fine. But you've just combined apples and oranges. I cannot think of a single model of evolutionary psychology based on punctuated equilibrium. I'd be curious to know what you mean. LIkewise, I'm curious to know how you can say the very theorists of evolutionary psychology, the ur-sources, as it were, are somehow narrow and not representative. They all but invented the field. Who hasn't read the science?
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 7, 2010 11:23:24 PM
"views the mind as a massively modular system designed to solve a massive array of adaptation problems."
What a strange shorthand. After all, doesn't every evolutionary biologist view the body as a "massively modular system designed to solve a massive array of adaptation problems"?
Posted by: billy | Mar 8, 2010 9:45:17 AM
Billy,
1) The question was about the modular structure of the mind, not the modular structure of the body. You make a huge and unwarranted leap if you assume the first is simply identical to the second. Even if you assume, as I do, that the mind is created by the brain, and the brain is a product of natural selection, that does not mean that the mind is isomorphically identical to the body, or that "mental organs" evolved under selection pressure in the same way, as say, livers or kidneys. Chomsky, who came up with the idea of the mental organ in the first place is very informative on this matter.
1) No, in fact not every every biologist views the body that way. The body is also made up of byproducts (spandrels), genetic drift, and excaptions (one thing jerry rigged for something else). Thus the very theorist of adaptation, George C. Williams, from his ground breaking study of 1966: "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that ought only to be used when it is really necessary."
3) Note you are disagreeing with your buddy Dave Ranning. You are saying that Cosmides and Tooby are representative, but they are right. Therefore EP is true. He is saying they are not representative and wrong. Therefore EP is true. One or both of you are wrong. My strong hunch is the latter.
In any case, why I don't understand is why you both go so far out on a limb to argue about stuff you clearly don't know very much about.
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 8, 2010 10:06:17 AM
How would you explain this quote from Cosmides and Tooby's Primer on Evolutionary Psychology:
"An organism's phenotype can be partitioned into adaptations, which are present because they were selected for, by-products, which are present because they are causally coupled to traits that were selected for (e.g., the whiteness of bone), and noise, which was injected by the stochastic components of evolution. Like other machines, only narrowly defined aspects of organisms fit together into functional systems: most ways of describing the system will not capture its functional properties. Unfortunately, some have misrepresented the well-supported claim that selection creates functional organization as the obviously false claim that all traits of organisms are funtional -- something no sensible evolutionary biologist would ever maintain."
Posted by: billy | Mar 8, 2010 10:25:34 AM
I would first of all compliment you on your expert use of Google. I would then point you to C&T's use of the category of description in the passage you cite: they are saying, in effect, that all aspects of design may be described in the functional terms for which they were selected. So for example "whiteness" of bone like "thump-thumpyness" of hearts is a byproduct but skeletons and circulatory systems are not. That account remains within the adaptationist program, despite the requisite nods to noise and stochastic convenience etc.
Have you read any of C&T beyond what you get on 2 second Google search? I urge you to consult The Adapted Mind and the individual essays that followed. Trust me, the argument is almost always that x psychological trait is an adaptation for solving y problem in the Pleistocene.
Finally, none of this has any relation to point #1 about the relation between the mind and the brain, about how modular the mind is and about whether mental organs/modules are adaptations. There is at the very least a great deal of debate about all these questions, though you might never know if you only stuck to what Nicholas Wade chooses to feature on Tuesdays in the NY Times.
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 8, 2010 10:58:39 AM
One very useful thing that EP does, is use the notion of function to rephrase questions--the approaches switches from "What is depression?" to "What does depression do?" This is a useful rephrasing because it might lead to some interesting answers--functional answers. Of course, there I go again, emphasizing the experiential over the logical. Sometimes getting outside of the mind is the best way to see the mind.
Posted by: lambness | Mar 8, 2010 11:06:17 AM
"Have you read any of C&T beyond what you get on 2 second Google search?"
Actually I don't think so, but I have read Wilson, Pinker, and miscellaneous articles here and there.
"That account remains within the adaptationist program, despite the requisite nods to noise and stochastic convenience etc. [...] Finally, none of this has any relation to point #1 about the relation between the mind and the brain, about how modular the mind is and about whether mental organs/modules are adaptations."
I guess I'm not clear as to what your position is--is it that the mind isn't modular at all, that it's a blank slate? That no mental mechanisms were selected for, and instead all are just evolutionary noise?
Posted by: billy | Mar 8, 2010 11:20:42 AM
My position is that there is a lot we still do not know about the way that the mind works, about which systems are modular, and which are not, and about which were "selected for" and which came along for the ride. That's not anti-nativist. It just proposes that we bring to the mind the same sort of modest approach that science takes to any natural phenomena.
My position is also a slight annoyance that the pro EP crowd here keeps switching the terms of the discussion. So one minute the mind is a modular system just like the body and one minute it isn't. One minute every module responds to a selection pressure, another minute only some do. One minute evolution is gradual, another it is punctual. All this moving of the goal posts does get irritating.
You may be unclear about my position is. I have no idea about yours.
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 8, 2010 11:55:43 AM
I don't really know what you're referring to by "switching the terms of the discussion". When was the minute when the mind wasn't modular? When was the minute when every module responded to a selection pressure? It doesn't seem to me that C&T would disagree with your first paragraph. I'm just not seeing what your problem with EP is.
Is it that C&T are, say, 90% adaptationist when they should really be only 50% adaptationist? That's my best guess at this point.
Posted by: billy | Mar 8, 2010 1:23:05 PM
I find it quite remarkable that you admit to not having read Cosmides and Tooby and yet claim that "it doesn't seem to me that C&T would disagree ..." How could you possibly know?
Anyway, the difference between their perspective and the perspective I briefly sketch in that paragraph would be apparent, for example, in whether one wants to argue that "depression is an adaptation," to return to the question from so long ago.
Before responding, why don't you take a few days to read through the EP literature. Take a gander at C&T's edited collection, the Adapted Mind along with, say, Pinker's How the Mind Works and then tell me whether or not their view is really compatible with I outline in that paragraph.
Posted by: Jonathan | Mar 8, 2010 2:29:50 PM
I was basing my sense of C&T on the primer that I referenced, including the section that I quoted. Have they commented on "depression is an adaptation"? Here's what C&T say:
It doesn't seem to me that depression fits (although I haven't read the study), as Beyerstein explained, and as many scientists said in the original article. In any event, I don't think it's fair to take one study or one hypothesis as representative of all of evolutionary psychology. Anyway, maybe I'll read a bit more. (I have read "How the Mind Works", twice I think.)
Posted by: billy | Mar 8, 2010 4:53:47 PM
For those who are interested in the "depression is an adaptation" question, I found a better take on it here, especially starting page four under "Tests". (Randolph Nesse, Is depression an adaptation? Archives of General Psychiatry, 57: 14-20, 2000.)
Posted by: billy | Mar 9, 2010 9:11:16 PM
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