"In the industrialised world, roughly 1 person in every 25 has severe mental disorder, and nearly half of us will experience some kind of mental illness during our lives. Many conditions, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as developmental conditions like autism, are at least in part inherited from our parents. If they affect people's chance of survival you would expect natural selection to have eliminated them, but instead they persist at high levels. Some argue that these genes bring benefits – mental illness and genius have a long-standing link – but archaeologist Penny Spikins at the University of York, UK, goes further. She believes that mental illness and conditions such as autism persist at such high levels because in the past they were advantageous to humanity."
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So, by "goes further," you mean "doesn't actually say anything new, but puts it in the language of evolutionary psychology, which means we can make a story out of it!"
@Jared I don't want to pass judgement on some work that I haven't seen, but this research seems to be just so much storytelling. Penny Spikins has no access to mental illness data from the past, so she doesn't even know if the trend she is "explaining" is even real.
Everyone know autism gets you laid.
Is anyone else reading The Marriage Plot right now? This kind of parallel's Leonard's hypothesis about his illness, no?
I get so irritated when I read that kind of hack biology. Traits do not persist for the good of a species. If this is really what she said (I couldn't get access to the whole article) Penny needs to read a book about basic evolutionary theory. Traits persist because they give some advantage (in terms of surviving to reproduce) to the individual who has the trait or, perhaps, to his or her close relatives who also carry the individual's genes. Or, sometimes, a disadvantageous trait carries with it enough benefits to outweigh the disadvantages. The famous evolutionary example of this is sickle cell anemia, a serious inherited disease also known to give people with the disease a higher resistance to malaria. I don't know that kneetoe is correct about autism, but it has been suggested by some serious research on autism that it is a kind of "super maleness," and it is much less prevalent in women. I can also imagine that someone with bipolar disorder might be fun in the sack about 1/2 of the time, or that mild depression could be a self-defense mechanism.