EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY FORUM ARCHIVE
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Evo Psych and the value of emotions
Carey · 06/05/04 at 4:17 ET
Hey fellas, Apologies for my inconsistent presence at the forum over the last few months . . . final exams are rapidly approaching . . . Hope everyone is well. Fred: sorry about your news . . . I know you still feel great (very good to hear)), but I still wanted to offer my friendly concern and best wishes. Right: onto business. I hope you all won't mind that this is partly a question and partly a call for moral support; I know of no others who offer better advice than you guys. This is an issue I've encountered many times, but recent circumstances have made it particularly salient. Thoroughly convinced by the logical and empirical appeal of evolutionary biology, I accept completely that human emotions are adaptations ultimately tied to the reproductive success of our ancestors. From an admittedly cold perspective, even the most powerful of our feelings reduce to the mathematics of genetic replication. I've talked about this point and its implications to a number of people, almost all of whose faces blanche and turn sullen as though I'd announced the death of a beloved pet. They have difficulty separating the mechanistic paradigm inherent to evolution by natural selection from the value of personal experience, and they claim, in many words or just a few, that such reductionism surely devalues emotional content and saps the romanticism out of life. I've never agreed with that perspective . . . as I see things, removing the mystery from an overwhelmingly powerful experience does not make the experience any less meaningful (Fred . . . be kind in your response). If anything, such an understanding as that provided by evolutionary biology makes emotional content more personally valuable . . . but that hardly ever wins over the person or people to whom I'm talking: "Carey, aren't you trying to have your cake and eat it too?" In the end, whether an understanding of evolution changes the value of emotional experience seems to me to be a choice, rather than a point subject to formal argument . . . but I've been hard-pressed to find anyone who’s made the same choice as I. Highest regards, PS As you all have no doubt deduced, I am indeed in love with a girl.
Carey
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