Some people have argued that shame was developed in order to keep humans acting in accordance with social norms, required for acceptance into civilization versus being tied to a rock outside. However, Scientific American pushes back on this, mentioning the fact that the emotion of guilt, separate from shame, is what serves such a purpose. In fact, if the purpose of evolution is to further propagate the species and your own bloodline, remembering getting rejected over AOL Instant Messenger in high school seems to be doing no one any favors in that regard.
So what exactly is the purpose? When your tighty-whities are run up the flagpole, what exact proud purpose does your grey matter think it’s achieving by barking out the orders to send all the blood in your body to your face? Darwin is, of course, dead, so we don’t have the luxury of contacting him, outside the scope of a powerful mystic, to ask his opinion on why our body decided to respond this way to the experience of taking a loud and violent shit in the work bathroom.
Maybe it’s not a feature, but a bug. An unfortunate occurrence of the wiring of a complex human mind that, over centuries, has mistranslated “danger afoot” from imminent physical harm, and connected that same mental terminal to “taking too big of a bite of your hot dog while on the Jumbotron and starting to dry heave.” Maybe our brains, for the unbelievable natural miracle they are to have developed to such a state, are still jerry-rigged in ways we don’t understand, and evolution is looking at it like a car whose heat won’t turn off, saying, “Well, does it get you to work or not?” Maybe, for the honor of being able to tie a knot, make a sandwich and think up clever comments like, “You should be ashamed of writing this article,” we’ve got to take the mental lumps.
Science, the ball is in your court. Hook electrodes up to my brain and then show me my old DeviantArt page. It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for all of our mental health.