Why Relationships Exist: Evolutionary Foundations for Psychotherapy – Randolph Nesse

Professor Nesse is professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry and department of psychology at the University of Michigan. He is Former Founding Director of the Center for
Evolution and Medicine at ASU.

Randy helped establish one of the world’s first anxiety disorders clinics in Michigan and
conducted research there on neuroendocrine responses to fear.

He was the initial organizer and second president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society,
and subsequently became president of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public
Health. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the
Association for Psychological Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the AAAS. And importantly
from the point of view of this lecture, Randy is recognised as the father of the field of
Evolutionary Medicine.

Randy co-authored a landmark book in 1994 together with George Williams, Why We Get Sick:
The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, which inspired the whole field of Evolutionary Medicine
world-wide. He has also written extensively about the evolutionary origins of moral emotions,
strategies for establishing evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine as well as on
numerous other areas concerning the application of evolutionary science to medicine and
psychiatry. In 2019 he published Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of
Evolutionary Psychiatry which should be required reading for anyone interested in an
evolutionary understanding of mental health and mental disorder.

The title of his lecture is: Why Relationships Exist: Evolutionary Foundations for
Psychotherapy