“Geneticists are starting to unravel evolution’s role in mental illness”
“Many of schizophrenia’s symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations and jumbling sentences, involve brain regions tied to speech, says Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Over the course of hominid evolution, he says, the ability to speak could have outweighed the small, but unavoidable risk that the genes involved in language could malfunction and result in schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population…
People who live in European regions with relatively lower winter temperatures, they found, were slightly more genetically prone to schizophrenia. Polimanti suggests that if genes that helped people tolerate cold were located close to variants that promote schizophrenia in the genome, then the latter could have been inadvertently carried along during evolution as a “fellow traveller”…
An overactive immune system is thought to be involved in many psychiatric disorders, such as depression2, but a stronger immune system would have made human ancestors more resistant to diseases, says Stranger.”
Related: “An Ancient Cure for Alzheimer’s?”; “In an age of rampant narcissism and social cheating — the importance of teaching social evolutionary mechanisms.”; “The Strange Inevitability of Evolution”
