what is the EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGE...

of addiction ?

mostly seems maladaptive in its present state.  Young addicts tend to die earlier or have damaged offspring if any.

Well, if we think about how addictions hijack our reward pathways
- you might say that being receptive to small amounts of endorphins/serotonin etc released internally was a good thing as it provided incentive for people to exert themselves and continue struggling in harsher times.  And then addicitive substances came along and abused those pathways on a much larger scale.

your body percieves something as beneficial

your body makes you keep doing that thing

this is a good thing if the thing is actually beneficial

it is not when it isnt

the things that are not beneficial are more new, less relevant to our evolutionary origins

heroin etc

what is the evolutionary advantage of enjoying anal sex?
what is the evolutionary advantage of using contraception?
what is the evolutionary advantage of enjoying artificial sweetners?
what is the evolutionary advantage of enjoying music?

humans are quite good at finding ways of hacking life to give them reward for non-evolutionarily advantageous behaviours.
We didn't evolve with drugs, our suseptibility to addiction to drugs is because addiction to natural reward triggers: food, sex, love, all gave huge evolutionary benifits.

People say addiction is a disease, but what they don't realise is it's entirely natural.

>>5
People are too generous with the term disease, as well as the term addiction, and anyway lots of nasty shit is natural.  Some of that natural shit can fuck right off.

Let us define addiction as "the uncontrollable desire to do something harmful."

When humans were still evolving there was no heroin or tobacco or bad substances in our environments. Even if there was Substance X in our environment, the individuals who did become addicted to them, due to e.g. small brain differences, would be killed off by natural selection and the only genes in the human population left would be the ones for not liking the taste of substance X.

If hominids 1 mya werei ntroduced to tobacco, some would be really addicted, others would not really like it. The ones who did not like it will live on to spread their genes and eventually all hominids would come to dislike tobacco.

The evolutionary reason people nowadays like tobacco is that there hasn't been any natural selection that could eliminate humans' desire for this particular substance.