Something interesting in the newspaper over the weekend: an interview with Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. Here's the last part:
Q: Our "Stone Age psychologies" haven't kept pace with the way we live. Explain.
Bloom: A study asking kids in urban Chicago what they were the most afraid of did not yield a most popular answer of "guns." It was spiders and snakes, which have terrified people through the ages. Another example: Jealousy, anger and tribalism are all qualities that evolved to help humans deal with life in small groups. Now in a huge, anonymous world we still have the same feelings and that can mess us up. Some complete stranger writes a nasty comment on his blog about me and I get really mad. A rational person is amazed at road rage. Our minds were not built to deal with strangers, but with people you would meet over and over again.
Q: How is the current obesity epidemic linked to this theory?
Bloom: Our desire for fatty foods is still the same as it was when they weren't plentiful. People were wired to gobble it up wherever and whenever they found it. It was once useful to store that fat in our bodies. Now there's too much of it around. But we'll only stop eating too much if natural selection rewires us, and it will only happen through who has the most children.
Q: Ah, the Darwinian approach to dieting. What would Darwin have thought of your book?
Bloom: I think he would have written me a blurb.
I've sometimes thought that, in addition to being "wired" to consume fatty foods, we are sentenced to misery by the facts of life uncovered by Darwin. The restless and disturbed ones had more sex with more partners, thereby filling the gene pool with their unhappy propensities. We are not, biologically speaking, the descendants of some ancient Socrates.
It's not just the overfed among us who argue for Darwin's dangerous idea. It's the psychiatry patients.
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