Sarcasm a survival aid? Yeah, right.
by friver ~ June 26th, 2008. Filed under: Strange Research.
According to a neurophysiologist at the University of California named Katherine Rankin, sarcasm may have played a significant role in human evolution.
Dr. Rankin discovered that sarcasm plays an important role in human social interaction. And when people lose their ability to detect it in each other (such as after head injuries or illnesses like dementia), it affects their ability to react to other people in socially appropriate ways.
And since our social behaviors are part of the reason we’ve been so successful as a species, evolutionary biologists believe that sarcasm, as negative as it may seem, was actually beneficial to us as a species.
But I could care less.
