this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Did we ever figure out why we evolved brains that produce cortisol?
Also, humans are not machines, we need rest and relaxation. It's debatable for why, but life would be a lot more boring if we didn't have a need for relaxation, art, recreation, etc. Just pure work for survival.
Cortisol is actually a really important hormone and it can even make you feel good. The problem is when you have too much too often. It’s like putting your body and mind into sport mode. Very useful in the short term but unsustainable in the long term.
Because people who are born lucky enough to have an easy life are likely to have more kids.
Using cortisol to magnify that improves selection bias.
The rest is math.
Evolution is a bitch.
Uh, poor people tend to have more children than rich people.
That's only a recent thing though
what does "recent" mean? Poor folks been having shit tons of kids for a long ass time. THey needed to have a) extra workers, and b) a chance at keeping the family name/heritage/culture/whatever going. especialyl being poor, you know at least 3 or your 10 arent going to make it, so you gotta play the odds!
IDK if the original hypothesis is true or not. But it's kind of impossible to make judgements on evolution based on anything we know about humans and society. Modern homo sapiens are only about 150,000 years old and were pretty sure any semblance of a modern hierarchical society didn't begin until about 7,500 years ago, much less the concept of money which only happened another thousands of years later.
10,000 years is a drop in the bucket evolutionarily, hell, 100,000 years doesn't even do much, so any theory of evolution or why a complex hormone like cortisol evolved to be used in the way it is now is way off base if you're referencing concepts like "rich" and "poor" or reference to any form of societal structure made in the last 10,000 years.
Immagine what it could be if the cortisol mechanism didn't work
Not us, that's for sure.
A successful organism would not have evolved to highly express cortisol to weed itself out in the case that it has a stressful life. It makes no sense for an organism to evolve a trait that makes it at best equally likely and at worst less likely to reproduce.
The reason we release excess cortisol in modern life is because our bodies did not evolve for constantly present stressors, they evolved to be stressed in a situation, run away from the tiger, and then you're good.