Plenty of things appeared in humans for no positive reason. Its not like smallpox was valuable it some point.
Its possible that depression has some positive function, but its just as possible it does not.
So if you didn't mean the usual metaphorical notion of, "was selected for by natural selection because it increased evolutionary fitness", what did you mean?
I think the prior poster may have been making a point more along the lines that depression is a downside of having benefits like neural plasticity or something, not that this disease state is necessarily beneficial in itself. More like how the downside of having high-performance tires is poor rain traction or something.
The trait is passed on because it benefits the species. You have to consider more than individuals in the evolution of social animals. In various circumstances some organisms will eat their own offspring. Obviously the "infanticide gene" if considered alone, would not make evolutionary sense, yet there it is.
Group selection is a possible mechanism in social animals, but it requires the group to be strongly interrelated relative to the rest of the species, and it relies on the group being able to expand at the expense of the rest of the species.
Infanticide makes perfect sense; offspring are only related 50% to the parent, so if resources are less than 2x as effective in the bodies of offspring compared to once they have been digested by the parent, of course they should be consumed. The genes of the offspring won't agree, of course; for them the calculation is reversed.
> Another reason depression is thought to be a pathology is that key symptoms, such as loss of interest in virtually all activities, are extremely costly to the sufferer. Biologists and economists have proposed, however, that signals with inherent costs can credibly signal information when there are conflicts of interest. In the wake of a serious negative life event, such as those that have been implicated in depression (e.g., death, divorce), "cheap" signals of need, such as crying, might not be believed when social partners have conflicts of interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_dep...
I dont know, IANAD, but it sounds mildly plausible.
These sort of ideas are hard to evaluate definitively, but I do think it is plausible that mild depression had/to some extent may still have benefits. Of course certain traits can be taken too far though, and when viewed through that lens it is hard to understand how they could be beneficial at all. One could say a similar thing about Autism-like traits.
Literal survivor's bias. If you are depressed but not resilient, you kill yourself.
> learning to overcome adversity, learning to overcome yourself
Overcoming adversity requires doing something. Depression prevents that.
> learning to be self-aware
I wish.
> thinking "differently".
In what way?
I don't agree with that and I don't agree with how it is stated. It's an absolutist statement (poster is not an expert) and it is dismissive via "silly".
I don't understand your objection. I don't understand the pedantry across this entire thread over like two or three words that aren't even wrong. Just read the extra sentence in the post.
I know this sounds rude, but how many arguments are we going to have over bikeshedding? It's like yall are looking for things to jump on and bully people about without any empathy.
I don't personally care but I don't understand why you do it.
This is what I'm talking about.
You guys can't imagine any way in which depressions might provide benefits? That's how multiple people in this thread have acted. But maybe, just maybe, people that are depressed have a different perspective on life and maybe feel differently.
What is the issue?
Yes, my own experiences with depression in those around me (thankfully not in myself) have left me seeing no way in which depression provides benefits. It is a terrible debilitating disease (or symptom, or whatever it is) that literally saps people of their will to do anything regardless of external stimuli. I find it very hard to imagine something so maladaptive being presented as possibly useful.
I would guess that sentiments like this are the main reason behind the powerful response to your thread. It is almost like claiming that "there is a reason for cancer".
Edit: I would also note that it's possible that we're simply talking past each other, as the term "depression" actually covers some quite different disorders; it's possible that what you're thinking of when you use this word is different from what I'm thinking of - to me, it mostly refers to a disorder where people feel either deeply sad or deeply anxious, but either way they are lacking almost entirely in motivation, finding it hard to even get out of bed sometimes; and all this with little relation to external stimuli.
This is all unsettled science. I've suffered depression for a decade. In my experience you learn to live with it and you learn from it even if you never fully get used to it.
Where did you get that absurd idea from?