Why We Get Sick Quotes

“Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, "suffering from tragedies that never occur"? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people?

Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Every textbook description of a disease should have, in our opinion, a section devoted to its evolutionary aspects. This section should address the following questions: 1. Which aspects of the syndrome are direct manifestations of the disease, and which are actually defenses? 2. If the disease has a genetic component, why do the responsible genes persist? 3. Do novel environmental factors contribute to the disease? 4. If the disease is related”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Chlamydia, today´s most common cause of venereal disease, does the equivalent of hiding in the police station.
Schistosomes of the mansoni type go a step further and essentially steal police uniforms. These parasites, a serious cause of liver disease in Asia, pick up blood-group antigens so that they may look to the immune system like our own normal blood cells.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Darwinism gives no moral guidelines about how we should live or how doctors should practice medicine. A Darwinian perspective on medicine can, however, help us to understand the evolutionary origins of disease, and this knowledge will prove profoundly useful in achieving the legitimate goals of medicine.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Most of us want most of all to be loved by someone who cared about us for ourselves, not for what we can do for them. For many, the search is bitter and fruitless.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“People are not controlled by some internal calculator that crudely motivates them to maximize their reproductive success. Instead, people form deep, lifelong emotional attachments and experience loves and hates that shape their lives. They have religious beliefs that guide their behavior, and they have idiosyncratic goals and ambitions. They have networks of friends and relatives.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Therapists have long known that many depressions go away only after a person finally gives up some long-sought goal and turns his or her energies in another direction.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Therapists have long known that may depressions go away only after a person finally gives up some long-sought goal and turns his or her energies in another direction.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Depression may seem completely useless. Even apart from the risk of suicide, sitting all day morosely staring at the wall can't get you very far. A person with severe depression typically loses interest in everything -work, friends, food, even sex. It is as if the capacities for pleasure and initiative have been turned off. Some people cry spontaneously, but others are beyond tears. Some wake every morning at 4 A.M. and can't get back to sleep; others sleep for twelve or fourteen hours per day. Some have delusions that they are impoverished, stupid, ugly, or dying of cancer. Almost all have low self-esteem. It seems preposterous even to consider that there should be anything adaptive associated with such symptoms. And yet depression is so frequent, and so closely related to ordinary sadness, that we must begin by asking if depression arises from a basic abnormality or if it is a dysregulation of a normal capacity.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Just as there are several components of the immune system, each of which protects us against particular kinds of invasions, there are subtypes of emotion that protect us against a variety of particular kinds of threats.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Paradoxically, it now is much easier to treat many mental disorders than it is to understand them.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Emotional capacities are shaped by situations that occurred repeatedly in the course of evolution and that were important to fitness. Attacks by predators, threats of exclusion from the group, and opportunities for mating were frequent and important enough to have shaped special patterns of preparedness, such as panic, social fear, and sexual arousal. Situations that are best avoided shape aversive emotions, while situations that involve opportunity shape positive emotions.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Just as the capacity for experiencing fatigue has evolved to protect us from overexertion, the capacity for sadness may have evolved to prevent additional losses. Maladaptive extremes of anxiety, sadness, and other emotions make more sense when we understand their evolutionary origins and normal, adaptive functions.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The current danger for most of us is not the deprivation suffered by our ancestors but an excess of nutrition.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The current danger for most of us is not the deprivation suffered bu our ancestors but an excess of nutrition.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Our dietary problems arise from a mismatch between the tastes evolved for Stone Age conditions and their likely effects today. Fat, sugar, and salt were in short supply through nearly all of our evolutionary history. Almost everyone, most of the time, would have been better off with more of these substances, and it was consistenly adaptive to want more and try to get it. Today most of us can afford to eat more fat, sugar, and salt than is biologically adaptive, more than would ever have been available to our ancestors of a few thousands years ago.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Except for professional athletes, dancers, cowboys, and a few other groups, most people in modern industrial societies have abnormally low energy expenditures. Workers sitting in swivel chairs or in driver's seats of cars or even pushing vacuum cleaners or electrically powered lawn mowers are being sedentary, and their leisure hours may be even more so.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“During most all of human evolution, it was adaptive to conserve energy by being lazy as circumstances permitted. Energy was a vitally needed resourse and could not be wasted. Today this take-it-easy adaptation may lead us to watch tennis on television when we would be better off playing it. This can only aggravate the effects of excess nutrition. The average office worker would be much more healthy if he or she spent the day digging clams or harvesting fruit in scattered tall trees.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“The single thing most people can do to most improve their health is to cut the fat content of their diets.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Pain and fear are useful, and people who lack them are seriously handicapped. As noted already, the rare individuals who are born without the sense of pain are almost all dead by age thirty. If there are people born without the capacity for fear, you might well look for them in the emergency room or the morgue. We need our pains and our fears. They are normal defenses that warn us of danger. Pain is the signal that tissue is being damaged. It has to be aversive to motivate us to set aside other activities to do whatever is necessary to stop the damage. Fear is a signal that a situation may be dangerous, that some kind of loss or damage is likely, that escape is desirable.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Some cues -for instance, snakes, spiders, and heights- readily elicit fear in ourselves and other primates. It should not surprise us to discover that we instinctively avoid certain cues that have long been associated with such dangers as falling and dangerous animals.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Our capacity to create and manipulate mental representations has many benefits, and the ability to foresee new dangers is clearly one of them. This capacity also helps us to avoid repetitions of actual experiences of danger or injury without creating unnecessary phobias.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“We can also, more than any other species, protect ourselves from being poisoned by learning about how to avoid it. Only we can read about the dangerous plants in our gardens and woodlands, and we are the the species whose diets are most shaped by social learning. A food our mothers fed us can usually be accepted as safe and nourishing. What our friends eat without apparent harm is at least worth a try. What they avoid we would be wise to treat cautiously.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“There is no such thing as a diet without toxins. The diets of all our ancestors, like those of today, were compromises between costs and benefits. This is one of the less welcome conclusions that arise from an evolutionary view of medicine.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Males are relatively more interested in fertility and sexual loyalty.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Mating without caring for the offspring benefits men's reproductive interests more than women's.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“Thanks to subsequent years of conversations with evolutionists, especially Williams, and with medical school residents and faculty, he has found that an evolutionary perspective on patients’ disorders has become steadily more natural and useful.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine