Good Reasons For Bad Feelings Reports From The Frontier Of Evolutionary Medicine

Author: Randolph Nesse

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General Fields

  • : $45.00 AUD
  • : 9780241291085
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Allen Lane
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  • : 0.611
  • : July 2018
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  • : 45.0
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  • : books

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  • : Randolph Nesse
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  • : Hardback
  • : 1
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  • : English
  • : 616.89001
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  • : 320
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Barcode 9780241291085
9780241291085

Description

With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us with fragile minds at all.

Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become excessive. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it.

Good Reasons for Bad Feelingswill fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness.