A Darwinian Approach to the Origins of Psychosis

Abstract

BackgroundThe onset of psychotic illness in the reproductive phase of life with a decrease in fecundity (and approximately constant incidence across populations) requires an evolutionary explanation. What is the survival value of the predisposing gene or genes?MethodEvolutionary theories, including the author's, are reviewed and critically compared.ResultsSome theories (e.g. Huxleyet al, 1964) postulate an advantage outside the nervous system: such theories fail to explain either the characteristic age distribution or constant incidence. More plausible are theories that relate the advantage to diversity of personality structure or social ability, or even to general intelligence, i.e. to the areas of function in which the phenomena of psychosis arise.ConclusionsIt is argued that psychosis arises as the boundary of a distribution of variation in cerebral structure generated in the course of hominid evolution. Language played a central role, with the critical changes taking place on the basis of a mutation that allowed the two cerebral hemispheres to develop with a degree of independence. Sexual selection (differing criteria in females and males in choosing a mate) acting on this genetic innovation has generated a dimension of competence in social interaction in relation to which there has been a progressive increase in cerebral size by delayed maturation (neoteny). A sexual dimorphism in cerebral asymmetry and the sex difference in age of onset of psychosis can be parsimoniously explained if a gene regulating the relative growth of the two hemispheres is X–Y homologous.