Obviously pain (even severe pain) is essential to human survival. But why would the body generate a degree of pain that essentially cripples the individual, leaving them basically helpless? How is this beneficial?
In: Biology
could still be better than the permenant damage caused by continual use of the joint/muscle.
humans are also not solitary animals; we have always had small to large tribal units; if you still provide some benefits to the tribe (or at least expected to be able to eventually) you can rest for several days without being eaten alive
Not everything evolution does is smart. And even when it does smart things, in order for those things to be passed down to offspring the person with those traits has to have offspring.
Pain is a response designed to interrupt what you *were* doing and make you pay attention to something that has clearly damaged your body. Some things like adrenaline and other responses lessen our reaction to pain. That’s evolution being smart: if something bites your leg you might need to run away from it quickly even if your leg is damaged and running will damage it further.
But sometimes the injury is so great, or whatever is wrong with your body is so widespread, the amount of pain generated interferes with your ability to remove the thing creating it. In nature’s opinion, those people are probably about to die so that’s OK. Very few people who sustain that much bodily harm manage to save themselves even if they can work through the pain. A lot of times even if they do, their body undergoes so much stress they end up sterile or not attractive enough to have more offspring.
So in general, the people who have the most children are not people who experience excruciating, debilitating pain. That means the pain tolerance genes getting passed around are fairly random, so our species isn’t trending towards any one particular response.
(Also, a lot of the things that cause pain like this are diseases and disorders. Predisposition to them can be genetic. So that these people end up in a state where they can’t or do not want to have children or raise children sort of pushes our species away from people who can survive that kind of pain and, instead, towards people who are not predisposed towards those conditions. Modern medicine that can treat this disorders can kind of tip that balance. That’s a weird thing. We can use technology to make up for how stupid evolution is. But using that technology can also make us require more technology. Some people think this means we shouldn’t use the technology, but I think long-term we’re better off outsmarting evolution than letting it roll the dice. Nature doesn’t actually care if humanity continues. Only we care, and only we will fight for that.)
The body is constructed to be self-sufficient and maintain itself in complex ways, but everything is just a reaction of cause and effect. The pain response is just a reaction towards damage. The greater the damage the greater response, even if it means overloading your nerves and crippling you. The body isn’t *consciously* trying to make you, the person, comfortable or live longer. It just reacts to outside influences because it has evolved to do so.
Because the body is not designed to be perfect, it’s designed to be good enough.
If you’re ever in a situation where you’re experiencing so much pain that you can’t even move, your chances for survival in a pre-modern time is basically zero anyway, so it doesn’t really matter what your body does.
Sometimes that has neurological causes, but I suspect that’s also because it’s difficult to evolve out a trait like debilitating chronic emotional and/or physical pain because it’s not a monolithic trait, what causes people pain and the level of that pain is highly subjective and individual to the person, their circumstances, and is normally relative to their previous experiences with pain.
I would think that in our evolutionary past, pain that was “debilitating” very often indicated a fatal condition. There was no selective pressure for us to develop a pain ceiling.
Humans are social animals. An individual isn’t necessarily helpless so long as he or she is amongst the tribe. Debilitating pain keeps you from making things worse by trying to walk or whatever on the part that’s busted.
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