Good Reasons for Bad Feelings w/ Randolph Nesse

Hello, everybody! We begin the week with an interview with the great Dr. Randolph Nesse. He is Foundation Professor of Life Sciences and Founding Director in The Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and Founding President of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health. He was the initial organizer and second president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and is currently the president of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). He’s also the author of several books, including Why We Get Sick (coauthored with George C. Williams) and, more recently, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings (2019).

In this episode, we focus mostly on Dr. Nesse’s most recent book. We first talk about the field of Evolutionary Medicine, and refer specifically to phenomena like antagonistic pleiotropy and aging, evolutionary mismatch and modern disease, and if we should approach diseases as adaptations. We then move on to discussing issues in Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology; the classification of mental disorders; studying emotions from an evolutionary perspective; and the Smoke Detector Principle. We talk about depression, and how we haven’t evolved to feel good or experience wellbeing. In the latter part of the interview, we discuss Psychoanalysis and the self-defense mechanisms, and also if people can benefit from learning about how their minds operate, from an evolutionary standpoint. 

https://youtu.be/o29wuO0AJUA

Link to podcast version (Anchor): http://bit.ly/2l6x26f