Are emotions such as courage, bravery, fear, love, sadness, and happiness humanity greatest weakness or greatest strength? As I see it there are three sides to this debate.

Greatest Advantage: Fear would keep us from putting ourselves in deadly situations, courage will help us fight, happiness helps us stay focused.

Neutral: It is neither, our emotions can come in handy and also be a burden.

Greatest Weakness: Fear can keep us from saving our own lives (unlikely example: needing to jump from cliff to cliff to avoid wolves or something). Courage can make us do things when the odds are against us and survival chances are low. Love can be very distracting.

I for one side with the Neutral.

I side with advantage because I work on entirely evolutionary principles. We almost certainly would not have evolved something so advanced if it were not an advantage on some level.

Whether or not it is our greatest advantage is tricky though. I think opposable thumbs are a pretty good idea. The respitory and circulatory systems are also fairly handy. Immune systems are nice.

Advantage.

Fear, the emotional manifestation of the flight half of the fight or flight mechanism, is essential to quick reaction to danger, and avoidance of dangerous places or things. We naturally fear dark forests at night because that was a place filled with predators when we were in our hunter-gatherer stage. This is the same reason we feel the need to remain close to members of the same species when we are scared, because we found strength in numbers when we were "growing up", in the evolutionary sense.

Love is important to our survival too. It is the emotional manifestation of the protection of one's close relatives. When we were "growing up", the people near us in our communities were almost always close blood relatives. This meant that it was helpful to show them affection and to protect them: not only would it aid in the carrying on of the genes you shared with them, but it would also aid your own survival, because of the strength-in-numbers principle.

What gave way to the emotion of love also gave way to empathy. When a close member of your community is injured, it is helpful to provide care and sympathy. Such behavior would help speed up the victim's recovery, and would help your community's survival power stay strong.

Emotions are the most helpful evolutionary trait since the immune system, IMHO.

Not everything evolved is important. Men have nipples.

Nipples are formed in the womb before the gender is created.

Quote from Jeremy

Nipples are formed in the womb before the gender is created.

Touche. One point to griffindor!

Neutral obviously

Quote from nrocha20

Neutral obviously

If it's so obvious, then why do I not know why you chose neutral?

Quote from Jeremy

Nipples are formed in the womb before the gender is created.

The appendix
The tail bone
Ear lobes

The entire "evolution gave us these features, that's why we have them" isn't so true. Say a human mutates at birth and he's got twice the strength of an average man. The mutation also made him blue. However, he will survive. In 2000 years everyone will be blue. Does being blue have an advantage? No. It's a trait we just happen to have.

However, I'm neutral.

I honestly can't decide. There isn't a fully acceptable answer. There are good and bad points. Some emotions at the wrong time could kill you, whilst others could save your life. I would not want to live without them, but that's just my desires, not necessarily what's best.

Quote from Ampersand

If it's so obvious, then why do I not know why you chose neutral?

Quote from NinjasRule34

Neutral: It is neither, our emotions can come in handy and also be a burden.

Didnt think anyone would need more of an explination then this.

Quote from Dudeman

The appendix
The tail bone
Ear lobes

The entire "evolution gave us these features, that's why we have them" isn't so true. Say a human mutates at birth and he's got twice the strength of an average man. The mutation also made him blue. However, he will survive. In 2000 years everyone will be blue. Does being blue have an advantage? No. It's a trait we just happen to have.

However, I'm neutral.

Actually, at some point a person will inherent the strength but not the blue, and if being blue is bad or unwanted, then the plain strength will survive, and the blue will die out.

If everyone that is blue is strong, the blueness will evolve with us.

Weakness .