The crisis of psychiatry – insights and prospects from evolutionary theory

Darwin’s emphasis on natural selection has had a transformative influence on how biological and medical sciences are conceptualized and conducted. However, the relevance of his ideas for the understanding of psychiatric conditions is still under-appreciated. Modern understanding of disease has required appreciation of the dialectical give and take between environmental influences, life history theory imperatives, human behavioral ecology, and characteristics of adaptive processes at all levels of the individual. This has enabled a better comprehension of metabolic disturbances, cancers, auto-immune disease, inherited anemias, and vulnerability to infectious disease 1. Here we propose that a…