[ExI] addiction

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 5:45 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 5:21 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I don't think people are going to get very far with understanding
>> addiction until they understand why human (some at least) can be
>> addicted at all.
>>
>> You folks are sick of hearing about it from me, anyone have an
>> evolutionary pathway to this curious trait.
>>
>
> To addiction? Why did addiction evolve? This seems ultimately simple to me
> (sorry for jumping in here nearly a year late, but the thread never got
> here and I thought I had something to add when it came up out of random
> chance.)
>
> THE most important evolutionary drive is the drive to reproduce. Without
> reproduction, genes are never passed on. Evolutionary game over.
>
> Reproduction in most all multi-cellular animals is through sexual
> reproduction. So anything that would drive animals to have sex would be an
> evolutionary driving force. So what is it that sex does? It produces
> endorphins, which are accepted by the pleasure centers of the brain as "job
> well done". Any animal that reproduces successfully has to WANT to have sex
> (at least in season - for seasonally reproductive animals) very much and go
> through whatever evolution has required it to do to get sex. The reward is
> the release of brain chemicals that you WANT again and again.
>
> So, what do drugs do? They stimulate the same pleasure centers of the
> brain that are stimulated by sex. They hijack the pathways that evolved for
> our most important evolutionary function and they do it well. So it's no
> wonder that we become addicted to anything that gives the same reward as
> sex does. It makes a ton of sense from an evolutionary viewpoint.
>
> -Kelly
> ​I have not seen any data on this in a long time:  did they ever figure
> why rats would stimulate their reward centers to the exclusion of food,
> water, female in heat, and until they passed out from weakness?​
>

​bill w​


>
>
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