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Comment by tasty_freeze | Hacker News Reader

> What are the evolutionary advantages of extreme or chronic pain?

That is a funny question. It is like asking: what is the evolutionary advantage of a broken leg? Sometimes things go wrong and the result is pain. There is no purpose to it; it just happened. Not everything has an evolutionary purpose.

My wife has Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, resulting in malformed collagen throughout her body. As a result, her tendons are too stretchy and don't work well, and so her bones don't align as they should, leading to wear and tear on joints and now incessant pain.

Also, many kinds of failures show up after the typical reproductive window. There is little evolutionary pressure to prevent such failure mechanisms.

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> That is a funny question. It is like asking: what is the evolutionary advantage of a broken leg?

i'm unconvinced... a broken leg isn't a normal biological function, while (afaik) pain is an entirely internal process that is a 'response' mechanism.

> Sometimes things go wrong and the result is pain. There is no purpose to it; it just happened. Not everything has an evolutionary purpose.

the ostensible purpose of 'some' pain is to cause you to stop or avoid doing something damaging, or being aware of a need to seek remedy. for those few people who don't feel any physical pain (congenital analgesia)... life is actually more dangerous.

when it comes to incapacitating levels of pain, things seem to get murky. there is some arguable benefit to adopting a protective posture (covering a wound, adopting a fetal position, etc) to mitigate further harm... but it seems these same behaviors can also increase risk of harm as well, especially when it comes to pain causing reduced situational awareness and other reasoning impairments.

> It is like asking: what is the evolutionary advantage of a broken leg? Sometimes things go wrong and the result is pain.

Pain and femurs are the result of over 3 billion years of evolution from prokaryotes (the simplest of single-celled organisms) to modern humans. It's a good question: What was the advantage that led to leg bones, and in particular to leg bones that break under that kind and direction of stress? Why not stronger or weaker? Why not more shear and less compression strength? What was the advantage of a nervous system, including one that produces pain, and one that produces that amount of pain or continuous pain?

> many kinds of failures show up after the typical reproductive window. There is little evolutionary pressure to prevent such failure mechanisms.

Pain occurs throughout life. Also, after reproduction successful organisms, at least of the human variety, raise and prepare their offspring for life, and even the offspring of their offspring.

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