3 ms·
>But if the conditions are unfavorable, if we’re starving, there’s a kind of switch from gearing up for sex and protein synthesis and bulking up to gearing up f
by fromthestart 8y ago
>But if the conditions are unfavorable, if we’re starving, there’s a kind of switch from gearing up for sex and protein synthesis and bulking up to gearing up for survival: battening down the hatches and waiting out the bad times. This genetic switch has been the focus of most work on aging over the last decade or so.
Pure speculation, but based on its pervasiveness, I've wondered if depression could have been selected for through a mechanism such as this.
- shaki-dora 8y agoIn my experience, reduced sex drive isn’t a terribly prominent symptom of depression. Personally, I have always liked the idea of depression being a sort of strike. A social signal “baked into” genetics. (Not that that interpretation has any more direct evidence. Maybe depression is just one of those bugs inevitable in billions of lines of self-modifying spaghetti code.)