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LS's picture

Reality Evolution

This is slightly off topic but last week I went to a lecture by John Cacciopo at Haverford about loneliness and isolation.  In a world of technological and medical revolutions people are living longer and the world is becoming a much smaller place.  However, with this business executives are being moved around the world to benefit productivity with out any thoughts about isolation.  In this research Cacciopo found that lonely and isolation are correlated with depression and that lonely and isolated individuals have a shorter, worse life.  However the most interesting part of the lecture I though was that Cacciopo thought that loneliness was a evolutionary construct.  We are organisms whose offspring require a long maturation period in which we need to care for them.  Evolutionarily in a harsh environment it is better and more advantageous for survival if one only has to feed and protect her self without sharing.  However, evolution is based on the reproduction of our genes, not our bodies.  Lonelyness is adaptive because it causes us to miss our offspring so that we do care for them and ensure our genes survival. 

I think that in the same way that loneliness is fitting and evolutionary adaptive our sense of reality is adaptive, this is stretch but the body does not do anything with out a purpose.  We don’t have extrasensory perception, and we cannot perceive all sorts of things around us, because the information would bombard our system and it would be horrible.  I am very interested in the way our brain makes up for things but no so worried as to what we are missing.  If we are so worried about what we are missing then we will never be able to enjoy what we do have.

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