Re:Edge of the Abyss (2012)
by inopinatus on Friday February 19, 2016 @01:46AM
(#11132026)
Human evolution is more complex than the survival of an individual, since many of our adaptations are transmitted as ideas not genes.
Following that line of thinking leads to notions about the presence & importance of second-order interactions (especially the impact of ideas on the survivability of a group); these make it hard to reject the hypothesis: production of outlier individuals is essential to our species.
Sadly outliers occur on all sides of the distribution, including the unhappy ones.
One of my parents has a serious mental illness. It first manifested and became obvious (requiring multiple hospitalizations over the years) in their late 20's after I was born. I don't have the data in front of me, but I understand a mid-to-late 20's onset and diagnosis of mental illness is not rare -- plenty of time to have kids beforehand.
But he wasn't talking about that. A lot (most?) people with serious disorders will not have children, and from an evolutionary perspective that's practically the same as if they died young. There's already selection against those traits.