So what is maladaptive are there breakdown in social ties and cultural/social infrastructure and process for supporting humans going though hell, not, in fact, my PTSD, thanks
Source: https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd/what-is-pt...
Malnutrition says hello. If there is any lesson of history it is "That would be extremly non-optimal of society." is not an arguement against it actually happening. Unless it would leave them literally completely non-viable extraordinarily messed up things can wind up winning out in the circumstances.
A bunch of malnourished farmers who were several inches smaller than their hunter-gatherer ancestors won out against the bands. Despite the obvious disadvantages. Numbers and potentially emplacements allowed the nutritionally stunted to not only win but essentially wipe out hunter-gatherers to the point where they are mostly found where agrarians weren't there to compete.
You might be correct (and one sibling commenter has for example already blamed a change in the availability of social support networks), but it's certainly not obvious to me what the difference might be that suddenly made PTSD a recent "discovery". So I still think it's everything but "obvious in retrospect" in at least one meaning of that phrase.
Maybe it was always with us, and people just failed to recognize it, but naively it would seem that live almost everywhere ought to have been massively more trauma inducing than in the contemporary West.
Just because someone is surviving and even reproducing doesn't mean they're not psychologically damaged. Even to quite a considerable extent.
Any psychological or physiological damage which doesn't noticeably dent your reproductive fitness, isn't -- at least as far as evolution is concerned. But being a mental wreck along the lines that PTSD is often portrayed very clearly would negatively impact your reproductive success.
There are plenty of people with PTSD who have families (particularly, kids). Our reproductive age begins really, really, really early and our reproductive drive is incredibly strong. I don't know why mental illness like PTSD would in any way impact our ability to procreate as a species or at an individual level. It might make life more difficult and life might be filled with more suffering, but we're able to procreate under all kinds of bizarrely sub-optimal conditions.
One wonders if you could imagine anything that might in any way impact an individual's ability to procreate and have surviving offspring, if you don't see how significantly heightened suicide risk, being volatile and potentially dangerous to be around and restricted in normal functioning might in any way impact an individual's success in having surviving offspring.
The same holds true for modern lead pipes. They work fine, until they don't.
> Trauma is as old as living creatures; war, disaster, bullying, and rape far predate homo sapiens . . . Our evolutionary history should have prepared us incredibly well for all of this; the brain “getting stuck” in fear mode after a particularly bad trauma should be no more likely than the legs “getting stuck” in running mode after a particularly long chase.
I took his "self-evident" to be from his point of view as a practicing psychiatrist. Whatever our evolutionary history, lots of people present with it in modern times. For someone who treats such people, once you have the concept for it, it becomes very clear what the disorder is.
This does however not prevent him from then recommending the book to one of his patient whom apparently is instantly cured by it.
Somehow the intro and ending seem at variance with the rest of the piece and I'm not sure your -- plausible -- reading entirely resolves this.
Lots of people presenting with a "disorder" is of course an imperfect indicator that the disorder has some objective basis in fact[1], but there is no real suggestion that Alexander thinks this is the case here. I'm not sure what to make of this piece.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(medicine)
> Local official records indicate genital retraction endemics in Hainan Island and Leizhou Peninsula in Guangdong, China, as early as the late 19th century.
The brain is essentially a pattern recognizer in the sense that it will look for danger, and consider ways to avoid the danger.[1]
If we think about the nature of trauma in the past, it has been a society where you are told by your surroundings that things like childbirth indeed is a dangerous but necessary undertaking, supported by the idea that your children will be able to take care of you when you're too old to do so yourself. The pre-modern world was a much more dangerous place due to the lack of modern medicine, et cetera.
Now, in the modern world, the expectations about childbirth have also changed for the better. WHO states that between 2000 and 2017 maternal mortality dropped by 38% worldwide.[2]
Going back to the original argument about PTSD, intuitively it makes sense that if you're subjected to a traumatic experience, your resilience (towards PTSD and other disorders caused by traumatic experiences) are very much affected by the individual's expectation towards the traumatic event. If people go through the event, with the expectation that there is a very probable risk that they will die, it seems there is relief in knowing you survived. On the contrary side, could it be the case that having overly optimistic expectations crushed by trauma, lead to the diagnostic symptoms we associate with PTSD?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4141622/
[2] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/maternal-mo...
In fact, the reason why some people are more resilient to the effects of PTSD than others is already well understood:
"While the presence or absence of any of these responses are not necessarily predictive, people who take a more active, problem-solving approach to the traumatic event are less likely to develop PTSD, while those who dissociate are more likely to develop PTSD."
In terms of selective adaptation, isn't the time scale for human evolution more like 40-50,000 years? IOW, biologically, aren't we living humans the result of evolutionary pressures that predominated in our distant ancestors' lives on the savannah?
US: https://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2016/05/25/1523592113.DCS... (Table S11)
Taiwan: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Iceland: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9vq5t6urtu930xe/2017-kong.pdf
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/18/ptsd/
then again, from what we can tell about the premodern world it seems much more violent than what we are accustomed to.
I dunno, man. If you want to take seriously some dude who builds a house of cards from incredibly tendentious evo-psych nonsense so he can scale it to the dizzying heights of "this is why all gay men lisp", you do you.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20081011094900/http://zero.poynt...
Dr. Cochran thinks that gay men lisp because a pathogen has affected their brains. But most gay men don't lisp. It was only ever a cultural thing, it was never universal, and it's mostly gone out of fashion in the last few decades.
He says that preferential male homosexuality has only been observed in humans and sheep. This is utter bullshit. Homosexuality has been observed in hundreds of species, including primates, mammals in general, birds, reptiles, and arthropods. This is not new research: over 450 species were known in 1999.
It goes on and on. This kind of ignorance might have been understandable, if not excusable, in the '70s, but Cochran was writing in 2005. He's making confident scientific assertions based on lazy, decades-old stereotypes, and there's no excuse for that.
To answer your question: no, I didn't read the article, because I read one sentence and concluded that it was horseshit. I should have taken a closer look before commenting, but I've done that now and my first assumption was 100% correct.
you ought to read about toxoplasma if you think complex behavior resulting from pathogen infection is outside the realm of possibility. 'lisp' is not strictly accurate, but gay men cross-culturally tend to particular speech patterns, including over-enunciation of the letter s, even as children; this isn't universal but it's fairly common, and i can't think of a reason that it would result from sexual preference per se.
>He says that preferential male homosexuality has only been observed in humans and sheep. This is utter bullshit. Homosexuality has been observed in hundreds of species, including primates, mammals in general, birds, reptiles, and arthropods. This is not new research: over 450 species were known in 1999.
i looked this up and you skipped over an important qualification: he said "at the-few-percent level". you should really learn to read what you're replying to.
It is conceivable that a pathogen could alter speech patterns, yes. My point was that if Cochran thinks all or most gay men have a distinctive lisp, then at least half his understanding of gay men is based on locker-room rumors and stereotypes. If he can't be bothered to educate himself on those basics, it calls his entire article into question.
If that were that were my only issue with Cochran's article, it would still just be a nitpick. But he gets everything wrong:
> among the Kalahari Bushmen, there doesn't seem to be any at all. Typically, hunter-gatherers have trouble believing that homosexuality actually exists.
There is native Bushman rock art explicitly depicting male homosexuality. See Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, published in 2000. Lots of extremely conservative/traditional cultures will tell you that none of them are queer, despite all evidence to the contrary.
> increased neuroticism and depression
Yes, gay men are prone to depression and emotional trauma. There's been quite a lot of research done on the causes. It mostly concludes that, surprise, they get depressed because they're discriminated against.
> the idea that male homosexuality is caused by a pathogen makes good evolutionary sense, unlike every other explanation ever proposed.
I'll just give you the link. Note the 2004 Italian study, particularly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation...
> The only two species known to exhibit this behavior, at the-few-percent level, are men and sheep.
Despite your repeating this, it's still bullshit. There are plenty of species with homosexuality rates equal to or higher than humans: giraffes, lions, and elephants, just to name a few.
Any sources I haven't linked here can be easily googled in a few minutes. If you choose to believe that being gay is a disease, nothing I can say will change your mind. Just understand that this is something you believe because it "feels right", not because there's compelling evidence.
Only from the myopic perspective of people only used to a life of luxury and ease.
Throughout most of history several of the people most close to you would have made an early and often quite unpleasant exit before you reached adulthood -- most of your siblings and children would probably not make it into adulthood and women had a double digit chance of dying from child birth[1]. And that held true even if you were an affluent member of a relatively stable and successful society.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139114/pdf/med...
So a priori it seems extremely unlikely to me that severely unpleasant experiences have psychologically crippling effects on a majority of people. Because that would seem to be extremely maladaptive for almost all of the last few millenia.