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A Darwinian Approach to the Origins of Psychosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

T. J. Crow
T. J. Crow*
Affiliation:
University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, OX3 7JX
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Extract

Background

The 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?

Method

Evolutionary theories, including the author's, are reviewed and critically compared.

Results

Some theories (e.g. Huxley et 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.

Conclusions

It 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.

Type
Review Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 167 , Issue 1 , July 1995 , pp. 12 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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