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| [Intellectual type stuff ahead.] |
Facebook surprises me sometimes when halfway (or more) intelligent or respectful threads emerge on complex or contentious topics. But it does happen! So I got involved just a bit. The issue was whether a particular affective state (in this case a particular emotional response) was adaptive and whether one could test a hypothesis for its evolutionary origins. Part of it was also whether every aspect of human life should have some kind specific evolutionary explanation.
My comments are stitched together here:
Speculative philosophy informed by science is useful and inevitable, as are generalized summaries of experimental results integrated into a broadly accepted metaphysics. But they can be misrepresented and over-used. The grey area between these things and the actual scientific processes of observation, correlation, and explanation, and experimentation seems inevitable as well. And on a related note, the price you pay for trying to have a theory that consumes everything is the risk of intellectual indigestion.
As to the specific type of study that might test the idea of loneliness as adaptation, I am sure one could extrapolate out from a proxy representing key variables or processes, but it would need to be really clever. If you could assign a marker for loneliness to non-human primate behavior in an appropriate taxon, you might have the start of something. But that is one really huge "if". Does anyone know if this adaptive loneliness idea has literature attached to it beyond "it appears it may be beneficial so it is probably an adaptation"? How do the authors frame their argument?
