Revisiting evolutionary psychology and psychiatry

S. Rose

Department of Biological Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK 7 6AA, UK

EDITED BY MATTHEW HOTOPF

At the risk of prolonging this non-meeting of minds, I must respond to the comments by Abed (2001) and Ayton (2000), passed on to me by Dr Lucas. No biologist could fail to agree with the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky when he argued that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution — a point made at length in, for instance, my book Lifelines (Rose, 1998). However, we must distinguish between testable and untestable evolutionary speculations, and between determining and enabling conditions.

Despite Abed's assertion, I find it difficult to imagine what type of empirical study could reveal whether or not "the human psyche or mind [was] formed primarily during the Pleistocene", although quite clearly evolutionary processes have both enabled and limited humans in their creation of the wide variety of psychic, social and cultural styles evident in the world around us. But what determines our mental states and actions is for most useful purposes better understood by examining proximal causation rather than distal generalisation. And I am extremely surprised to find a psychiatrist, of all disciplines, adopting the cognitivist style of referring to the ‘architecture’ of the human mind as if this rigid, blueprint-evoking metaphor could encompass the richness of evolutionarily, developmentally, socially and culturally shaped mental experience.

Ayton (2000) suggests that there has been some sort of conspiracy in psychiatry to ignore biology. I am not a psychiatrist, but like any other scientist, I endeavour to defend the truth as I see it, while recognising that all our perceptions of such truths are formed within the metascientific context within which all living humans are embedded.

REFERENCES

Abed, R. T. (2001) A defence of evolutionary psychology (letter). British Journal of Psychiatry, 179, 267.[Free Full Text]

Ayton, A. (2000) Implications of evolutionary theory for psychiatry (letter). British Journal of Psychiatry, 177, 370.[Free Full Text]

Rose, S. P. R. (1998) Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.





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