ReviewThe Behavioral and brain sciences2006
Resolving the paradox of common, harmful, heritable mental disorders: which evolutionary genetic models work best?
Review in The Behavioral and brain sciences, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 127 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
127 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 541 citations in OpenAlex.
- Is Psychopathy a Mental Disorder or an Adaptation? Evidence From a Meta-Analysis of the Association Between Psychopathy and Handedness.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior · 2021Pooled it
- De novo mutation in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2012Pooled it
- Family-Level Brain Pattern Similarities and Their Clinical Significance in Young Offspring of Individuals With Psychotic Disorders.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Metabolic Gating and the Evolution of Human Cognitive Plasticity: A Comparative Genomic Analysis.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Beyond Comorbidity: Evolutionary Insights Into the Concomitance of Neurodivergence, Major Depressive Disorder, and Anxiety Disorders.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- The DCIDE framework: systematic investigation of evolutionary hypotheses, exemplified with autism.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- A rare variant inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Understanding the Emergence of Schizophrenia in the Light of Human Evolution: New Perspectives in Genetics.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2025Review
- Assessing subclinical psychopathological and personality traits in a small-scale subsistence society.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2025Article
- Adaptiveness of dark personalities: psychopathy and sadism have opposite associations with fertility.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Are novel treatments for brain disorders hiding in plain sight?Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Review
- Fitness consequences of depressive symptoms vary between generations: Evidence from a large cohort of women across the 20th century.PloS one · 2024Article
- Genomic findings in schizophrenia and their implications.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Review
- Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2023Article
- The EEG multiverse of schizophrenia.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Genomic insights into schizophrenia.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- The evolution of personality disorders: A review of proposals.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
- Identification of multiple TAR DNA binding protein retropseudogene lineages during the evolution of primates.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Testing the evolutionary advantage theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder traits.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2022Article
- Specialised minds: extending adaptive explanations of personality to the evolution of psychopathology.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
67 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
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Abstract
Given that natural selection is so powerful at optimizing complex adaptations, why does it seem unable to eliminate genes (susceptibility alleles) that predispose to common, harmful, heritable mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder? We assess three leading explanations for this apparent paradox from evolutionary genetic theory: (1) ancestral neutrality (susceptibility alleles were not harmful among ancestors), (2) balancing selection (susceptibility alleles sometimes increased fitness), and (3) polygenic mutation-selection balance (mental disorders reflect the inevitable mutational load on the thousands of genes underlying human behavior). The first two explanations are commonly assumed in psychiatric genetics and Darwinian psychiatry, while mutation-selection has often been discounted. All three models can explain persistent genetic variance in some traits under some conditions, but the first two have serious problems in explaining human mental disorders. Ancestral neutrality fails to explain low mental disorder frequencies and requires implausibly small selection coefficients against mental disorders given the data on the reproductive costs and impairment of mental disorders. Balancing selection (including spatio-temporal variation in selection, heterozygote advantage, antagonistic pleiotropy, and frequency-dependent selection) tends to favor environmentally contingent adaptations (which would show no heritability) or high-frequency alleles (which psychiatric genetics would have already found). Only polygenic mutation-selection balance seems consistent with the data on mental disorder prevalence rates, fitness costs, the likely rarity of susceptibility alleles, and the increased risks of mental disorders with brain trauma, inbreeding, and paternal age. This evolutionary genetic framework for mental disorders has wide-ranging implications for psychology, psychiatry, behavior genetics, molecular genetics, and evolutionary approaches to studying human behavior.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.