From the Nicholas Humphrey paper cited in the post: "My view is this. The human capacity for responding to placebos is in fact not necessarily adaptive in its

From the Nicholas Humphrey paper cited in the post: "My view is this. The human capacity for responding to placebos is in fact not necessarily adaptive in its own right (indeed it can sometimes even be maladaptive). Instead, this capacity is an emergent property of something else that is genuinely adaptive: namely, a specially designed procedure for 'economic resource management' that is, I believe, one of the key features of the 'natural health-care service' which has evolved in ourselves and other animals to help us deal throughout our lives with repeated bouts of sickness, injury, and other threats to our well-being". in full here: http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2002GreatExpectations.pdf http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/2002GreatExpectations.pdf