Drop what you're doing and read about evolution

Evening, all.

I've been sitting on this article for a couple of weeks now, but I had a problem accessing the blog. Anyway, the subject matter is timeless: evolution and human happiness. Seriously, if you read one article this semester... well you should probably read more than one article this semester. But make this one of them.

A few weeks ago, we talked about the fact that different people have significantly different baseline levels of happiness. Feeling like I've been given a raw deal, I endeavored to read up on this phenomenon. I also wanted to learn more about another of Prof. B.'s ground-breaking assertions: who says we are meant to be happy? Who decided that happiness is the natural state, the ultimate goal that we should strive for? Does evolution support that view at all? This article sheds light on these points and many more.

Some teasers (I defy you to read my excerpts and not want to finish the article):

Although a reliable method to compare well-being across the centuries
is lacking, the remarkable growth in wealth and the
technological advances of recent decades have improved
human well-being considerably, but we have now reached a
point where average life satisfaction is stable at best, and
possibly declining rapidly (Kahneman et al. 1999). The
time is ripe to consider new perspectives on the factors that
influence well-being.

Because resources for intervention are so much more available than those for
prevention, the effects of early abuse and neglect, and the
effects of dysfunctional social groups, have been overshadowed
by the dominant paradigm of biological psychiatry,
with its emphasis on individual differences in brain
mechanisms and drug treatments (Valenstein 1998).
In the past decade, the challenge of finding routes to
human happiness has taken a new turn, with an explicit
focus not only on the causes of suffering, but now also on
the origins of positive states of well-being (Kahneman et al.
1999). This, in part, reflects a growing recognition that
happiness and flourishing do not automatically emerge
when the swamps of suffering are drained...

The average well-being for a society increases
as the average income increases up to the equivalent of ca.
$10 000 per year; above that level additional GNP adds
little to the average happiness ratings of the populace
(Kahnemann et al. 1999). Within societies, the picture is
different; increasing income increases ratings of well-being,
although the benefits taper off in high income brackets...

Even dramatic events such as becoming paralysed or winning the lottery
have effects on SWB that are strikingly small and temporary
(Brickman et al. 1978)

At least in modern Western
societies, people also tend to make disproportionate
investments in the pursuit of money, status and attractiveness,
domains in which the value of resources is intrinsically
relative to what others have, resulting in escalating
arms races that sap time and energy from friendships and
social engagement that are highly correlated with SWB

(b) Six reasons why the body is not better designed
Most people like to imagine that normal life is happy and
that other states are abnormalities that need explanation.
This is a pre-Darwinian view of psychology. We were not
designed for happiness.

Natural selection has no goals: it just mindlessly
shapes mechanisms, including our capacities for happiness
and unhappiness, that tend to lead to behaviour that maximizes
fitness. Happiness and unhappiness are not ends,
they are means.

One obvious possibility is that natural selection is too
slow to adapt us to rapidly changing environments. Our
modern world is vastly different from the environments in
which we evolved. Much, even most, chronic disease
results from this mismatch; atherosclerosis, diabetes,
hypertension and the complications of smoking and alcohol
are rare in hunter-gatherers even at older ages.

Third and fourth, there are many things that no system
can accomplish and some that are impossible for organisms
shaped by selection. Design trade-offs leave every aspect of
any machine, including the body, somewhat less than optimal.
For instance, thicker bones would break less easily,
but they would be heavy and unwieldy. Natural selection is
subject to additional constraints, especially the requirement
that changes can take place only by incremental alternations
of existing designs, and the result must work well in
every generation. There is some hope that the awkward
QUERTY keyboard will be replaced some day, but our
eyes will always be an absurdly designed device, with the
nerves and vessels running between the light and the retina
where they cast shadows and cause an unnecessary blind
spot.

Link to JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0962-8436%282004%29359%3A1449%3C1333%3ANSATEO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1&origin=serialsolutions