My PhD research is in computational/theoretical population genetics and I have many friends on the neighboring department of neurobiology and behavior and evolution comes up relatively often in discussions about behavior. I only mention that because I have had many many discussions with people who get immediately turned off by any reference of evolution impacting human behavior, and especially so when the term "evolutionary psychology" is used. I avoid mentioning it because of how reflexive the reaction is for many people. Is there room for disagreement here? Of course. Is this "batshit crazy garbage"? I really struggle to see how.

I asked Bard to summarize the article and these are the key points:

"The article 'Happiness is a Reward from Our Ancestors' by Wood From Eden argues that happiness is a reward for those who emulate their successful ancestors. The author states that our ancestors evolved to be happy when they were doing things that were beneficial to their survival and reproduction, such as raising children, finding food, and avoiding danger. Therefore, the things that make us happy today are likely the same things that made our ancestors happy, such as spending time with loved ones, feeling a sense of accomplishment, and being in nature. The author concludes by saying that if we want to be happy, we should live our lives in a way that honors our ancestors and their legacy.

Here are some key points from the article:

* Happiness is a reward for those who emulate their successful ancestors.

* Our ancestors evolved to be happy when they were doing things that were beneficial to their survival and reproduction.

* The things that make us happy today are likely the same things that made our ancestors happy.

* If we want to be happy, we should live our lives in a way that honors our ancestors and their legacy."

In that framing I'm more inclined to agree than disagree with the author, though an obvious counter argument is the happiness of parents compared to childless adults. As far as I have read happiness for parents dips while raising the children but then is made up for in later years when the children grow up. So, if that is the case, it is still a net positive, but isnt immediately as rewarding as the author makes out.

I can’t speak for GP but I laughed out loud when I read about how the author of this article knows how to “cure depression”.

Aside from the ignorance of brain chemistry, situational factors that can contribute to depression, and the glaringly obvious fact of the subjectivity of how depression is experienced, the hubris to assert that this blogger ~knows the cure ~ inspires very little confidence in their credibility.

For example, if you read me the first few sentences of this article and then said “This was written by someone that doesn’t provide any reason to trust their reasoning” I would not be surprised. In fact if you told me that the person that brags about their cure for depression in their blog was not very bright, I wouldn’t see cause to argue with you.

He didn't say he knows _the_ cure he says he cured himself.

It's like someone loses weight and sticks to it, they don't know _the_ cure for obesity, but they managed to go from being obese to not being obese and staying there for some time and then wrote a blog wherre they say "wow, i found i was over eating due to eating shitty lunches at my desk and not doing exercise so then i switched to salads and cycling to the office, turns out i cured obesity in myself"

It's completely different from putting forward an intervention and then claiming, against all scientific evidence, that this is a reliable and repeatable cure.

A good trick for reading comprehension is to read the last paragraph first:

"I don’t expect this to work for everyone or even most people who are inexplicably unhappy. But I believe that most people can gain some insight by reflecting over how their lives correspond to evolutionary history. " blah blah blah..

This is an incredibly weak claim, it's basically saying "[most] people can gain insight into their emotional state by reflecting on their basic needs and for some people (not all, or even most), that might make them not be unhappy, my evidence is a sample size of yours truly, plus maybe a few people i've talked to who agree".

Wow.

One can often get a different impression of articles by reading only the headline or the first para, which tend to be loaded with attention-getters or rhetorical tricks that are designed to be provocative and hook a reader in. It's easy to make knee-jerk emotional reactions.

Article seems to me, just to be full of rather banal truisms masquerading as science.

But so is just about everything else written on the topic.

> A good trick for reading comprehension is to read the last paragraph first:

I appreciate your concern for my reading ability!

As you’ve pointed out:

>It's easy to make knee-jerk emotional reactions.

Sometimes the urge to insert meaning into a text can be so strong that one can be compelled to ignore the entire premise of a blog post. Heck, a person might even resort to cheap condescension to defend what some might reasonably call empty self-congratulatory drivel!

She's essentially arguing that long-term happiness is an evolved signal that someone is on the right evolutionary path. It's the emotional self-help equivalent of a prosperity gospel.

Her argument can best be illustrated by a paragraph from another article titled How I cured myself with evolutionary psychology [1]

> In order to cure my depression, I did the evolutionary psychology thing hard-core: I got married and had children. I dropped out of university. I moved to the countryside. I started to renovate and build houses and to grow food for my family.

As far as I can tell, she has no training as an evolutionary psychologist. It's self help woo woo wrapped up in barely coherent scientific jargon.

[1] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-...