August 2026 – Evolutionary Psychology and How Depression Kept the Apes Alive
In this newsletter, I’m describing what Evolutionary Psychology has to say about depression, through EP’s basic question of, “How did depression help humans survive in evolutionary times?” Depression is so often described as if it had no roots, or was a meaningless distortion of neurochemistry, or worse, a character flaw. It is none of those. Rather, it has a deep history back to our ape ancestors, and an application even in today’s time that bears understanding and incorporation into our maps of what it is, and how to deal with it.
But in the present, I hope your summers are going well, with the right amount of comfort to keep you from being overwhelmed, and the ideal amount of challenge to keep you growing.
Evolutionary Psychology and How Depression Kept the Apes Alive
What Evolutionary Psychology has to say about depression
I’ve been thinking about evolutionary psychology recently, and I’m going to try to explain why it’s so interesting and useful, especially in relation to depression. For me, it’s been a really helpful lens to grok one important dimension of depression that’s not self-evident and unfortunately which the standard medical models don’t include. So, here we go.
Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is a subfield of psychology that crystallized in the early 1990s with the publication of the book The Adapted Mind (Cosmides and Tooby). The essence of EP’s insight is rather simple to say: specific psychological traits and behaviors (emotions, parenting, cooperation, competition, etc.) were, just like physiological features, subjected to survival pressure in evolutionary environments and shaped according to how those traits and behaviors performed or didn’t. “Environments” here refers not to particular places (say, the African savanna), but rather to the prehistorical features of the environment (such as predation, resource availability, status within small bands, kinship patterns, etc.), collectively called the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness” (EEA). EP says that our current psychologies are directly derived from those traits which allowed us to survive in the EEA. Any particular pattern that defines contemporary human psychology was built, tested, and stabilized within that EEA (traits that were tried out and failed to increase survival did not get passed on). Therefore, any particular psychological trait or behavior can be explored within this frame: “How did X contribute to the survival of individuals such that it has been passed on to the current time?”
Applied to the phenomenon of depression, then, EP simply asks, “How did depression contribute to the survival of humans in the EEA?” Depression, it says, cannot be primarily pathological, only destructive, or else it would have been removed from the gene pool eons ago. It must have borne some positive value in the EEA, regardless of its current value, to have been passed on. It takes a bit of head-scratching to figure out what the answer might be, but thankfully there are good scholars who can help us out, particularly Paul Gilbert (Depression: The Evolution of Powerlessness, 1992), and Paul Keedwell (How Did Sadness Survive: The Evolutionary Basis of Depression, 2008).
Both these authors situate depression within the evolutionary context and describe what might explain its longevity in human genetic history, even back to our primate ancestors (depression-like syndromes are observable in ape groupings). I’ll summarize their theories below, but just to cut to the healing-related chase about this EP view: because depression is an ancient biopsychological phenomenon, whose features and dynamics continue into today, EP gives us a detailed theory of both why it sustained, but also how current individuals did not create depression and why it does not simply represent a character flaw. I.e., why depression is not our fault. Since depression itself almost always comes along with self-recrimination and a kind of hyper-personalization, EP’s insights open up a greater space for self-compassion, which is vital in emerging from depression. (It’s no surprise that Paul Gilbert went on to elaborate a psychotherapeutic framework called Compassion Focused Therapy.)
So, Gilbert’s insights: in essence, Gilbert argues that depression is an involuntary behavioral and motivational shutdown based in the hierarchical ranking system of early primate bands, bands in which power is concentrated at the top of the society, but members carry basic drives to obtain more power through increasing social rank. This leads to power struggles in which the aggression of members either leads to successful claiming of power/rank, or failure. Aggression like this is not pretty, but not a problem per se; rather, the problem is unregulated aggression.
That is, if a grouping of apes did not have a mechanism to turn off their in-wired aggressive drive when it proved futile, then the individual may be destroyed, and/or the group itself destabilized by the conflict, both of which will leave the group weaker and less likely to survive. Given that apes do not have the mental and neurological architecture to self-reflect and choose to surrender the power drive (i.e., grieve futile pursuits and goals), those ape bands which had a biological mechanism to shut down that drive would have an evolutionary survival advantage over other bands. That is, those groups whose members could get depressed (or more accurately, forced into depression) survived better.
Gilbert (a tad dryly) summarizes this as:
The potential for involuntary, subordinate self-appraisal and its co-assembled affects and behaviours evolved, perhaps, precisely to inhibit an animal from challenging for breeding resources in situations that it could not win. The archetypal root of involuntary, subordinate self-appraisal can therefore be considered from the point of view of ranking behaviour and the evolution of reasoning systems, basic algorithms, that make ranking behaviour possible.
Depression may have evolved as a motivational, internal state to reduce aspiration level and inhibit agonism; it is the “go down, stay put” programme. But this programme will have been modified to fit different social environments. Specifically, there may be two archetypal forms: defeat arising from blocks to, or reversals of, up-hierarchy motivation, and high submissiveness directed at other conspecifics [i.e., members of the same species].
These basic programmes have been extensively modified over evolutionary time but, nevertheless, remain as potential responses to perceptions of defeat, inferiority, or low rank, making the individual more fearful of others, more avoidant, and/or more compliant. Low mood may be the motivational state that sets the internal parameters and conditions that would lead to the speed of giving up or not challenging.
The point here is not that we humans are “merely animals,” but that we’ve inherited underlying, biologically mediated routines that can get triggered when we are registering or imagining our own defeat. It is still an important dynamic in the primate sense, because although our current human “bands” are too large and complex to be affected by an individual’s inability to turn off aggression, that individual themselves will definitely be affected. Individuals have limited amounts of energy to spend towards our goals, and if a goal is proving futile (has been defeated, as it were) but we are not able or willing to let it go, then we are at risk of “bleeding out” by exhausting ourselves. If we can grieve (i.e., the process of letting go of unrewarding pursuits, see here), then depression is unlikely to be triggered; if not, then depression stands as a backup to help us survive by not destroying ourselves. But again, this is an involuntary, evolutionarily sculpted process.
Our second scholar, Keedwell, gives a similar take as Gilbert, but with a stronger argument about depression’s usefulness in the contemporary environment. Essentially, he is saying that for goals that have become futile (more broadly than just status/rank-oriented goals), we must surrender the goal through the process of grief. If there are obstructions that frustrate the surrendering/grieving of these goals, he argues, stress builds up and eventually becomes the trigger for depression (the same argument I extrapolate here). He does acknowledge that this view is primarily applicable to mild to moderate depression, that in severe depressive episodes depression becomes self-reinforcing and predominantly destructive. He writes, “There is no doubt that depression is an illness, and it can be so severe that it can lead to loss of life, or we can become stuck in depression.”
Nonetheless, in the predominant number of cases, Keedwell argues that depression serves a function that is based in evolutionary adaptations that still apply today. He writes:
Depression is activated only when goals are persistently frustrated over a long period of time….[M]oral scruples, personality problems (like low self-esteem, or exaggerated expectations of success), ignorance of the difficulties facing us, interference from a third party (someone pushing us on when we know we should stop) or the modern societal conditions of entrapment (such as poverty or unemployment) will act to prolong the stressful situation, increase the load, and make us pass from stress to strain.
Depression is needed because [these] factors…are stopping us from giving up on the goal voluntarily. They are blinding us to the fact that the goal may never be reached, and in the meantime we are suffering a lot of stress. It is an involuntary break. Beyond a certain point of strain there is no choice in the matter—we will become depressed. The state of depression is a compulsory sentence, which works through altering reward energy and motivational systems in the brain, and so we stop ‘chasing rainbows’. This means that we can conserve energy and resources and avoid any further harm.
Depression may cause us to consider an alternative goal, it may cause us to consider alternative standards by which to judge our progress toward the goal (particularly relevant to the perfectionist) or it may cause us to reflect on an alternative goal-seeking strategy. Depression helps us to consider these alternatives by shifting our thinking to the more realistic and more systematic. We are forced to be self-centred and introspective because social interaction no longer holds any pleasure for us. We are not distracted by activities directed towards pleasure. Moreover, the pain of depression will make us consider more radical solutions to avoid returning to the same state of incapacity. Radical solutions may well be required: thinking along the same lines will often cause us to return to the same problems.
So, those are the arguments for how depression was transferred forward through the gene pool, based in adaptations arrived at in the EEA and extended into depression’s usefulness today. Depression is not, then, merely a disease or a distortion of brain chemistry. As much as the basic system can get distorted and self-destructive in the modern context of fancy cortical brains which can recycle threats and losses endlessly, depression has a purpose that needs to be understood and respected in order to influence.
More generally, the environmental psychology lens is vital to understanding any human psychological and behavioral phenomenon, to put the contemporary “us” into context of our ancestors back then. If we don’t use the EP lens, we will often get false readings on who and what we are, overemphasizing personal culpability and deemphasizing the impersonal and automatic nature of depression. This inevitably leads to all sorts of confusions and unnecessary sufferings.
Although EP can sometimes seem unnecessarily academic—“Hey, I’m just trying to feel better!”—it’s deceptively important to healing depression. Having a narrative of depression that actually fits the reality, and which points legitimately to its automatic, evolutionarily-sculpted nature, gives us a model to displace the one that depression itself gives us. Rather than, “I’m weak, the world is pointless, life is not worth it,” we move towards, “I’m being affected by an ancient piece of programming that’s pointing me to a need to grieve a loss.” This is a tectonic shift, not in the symptoms of depression per se, but in how we make meaning of it.
