Understanding phenomena has worked wonders in traditional medicine, and Nesse makes an appealing, convincing argument that...
An ingenious exploration of how Darwinian evolution explains mental disorders.
Psychiatrist Nesse (co-author: Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, 1995, etc.), the founding director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine of Arizona State University, points out that even though successful organisms are well-adapted to their environments, all suffer disease. Diseases are not adaptations, but the traits that lead to them can be explained. Indeed, there are “good evolutionary reasons why we have desires we cannot fulfill, impulses we cannot control, and relationships full of conflict.” Nesse points out his specialty’s core dilemma. While physicians have long frowned on treating symptoms (pain, fatigue, sadness) as diseases, psychiatry hasn’t gotten the message. Provided depression or anxiety is intense, it becomes a disorder to be treated, regardless of the patient’s life situation. Yet unpleasant feelings, no less than physical discomfort, represent useful evolutionary responses. “Natural selection does not give a fig for our happiness,” writes the author. “In the calculus of evolution, only reproductive success matters.” Thus, anxiety is useful for dealing with threats of all kinds—debts, deadlines, oncoming cars, etc. A human with a lack of anxiety will be eliminated from the gene pool by getting killed or jailed, but on the other hand, someone consumed with anxiety has little sex appeal. Depression may not be the consequence of a disordered brain but rather a normal response to an unreachable goal. Many of us have more of certain feelings than we need, but instead of assuming that a pleasant emotion is good and a painful emotion bad, evolutionary psychiatry evaluates its appropriateness to the situation. Readers searching for an attack on psychiatry or a formula for achieving happiness have an avalanche of choices, but they will not regret choosing this book, which is neither.
Understanding phenomena has worked wonders in traditional medicine, and Nesse makes an appealing, convincing argument that psychiatrists who recognize the evolutionary function of emotions will find greater success.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-98566-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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