Dawkins uses the term 'selfish gene' as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution (as opposed to the views focused on the organism and the group), popularising ideas developed during the 1960s by W. Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966).

Luckily that is someone else’s battle.The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book on evolution by the ethologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author builds upon the principal theory of George C.

Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender speciﬁc behaviour. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly inﬂuence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders ﬁt poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conﬂict while they recover. the beneﬁts of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selﬁsh Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacriﬁce themselves for others.Ī range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. ‘Inclusive ﬁtness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the ﬁttest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. “The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology.

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