The inaugural meeting of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group (EPSiG) of the Royal college of Psychiatrists took place on 12 January at the college HQ in London. This is the first evolutionary special interest group in any UK medical royal college. The formation of EPSiG is the culmination of a year-long process which involved submitting a proposal to the college Council, having it approved then gathering the support of a minimum of 120 members/fellows (we got 170 expressions of support) and then having this verified by Council and finally having the inaugural meeting. Although there was clearly a great deal of sympathy for the idea among college members/fellows for the formation of the SIG when it came to actual attendance at the inaugural meeting the numbers unfortunately dwindled to no more than 20 or so. Therefore, we realise that we still have a lot to do to persuade our colleagues within the college that the evolutionary perspective is important to psychiatry both theoretically and clinically. Nevertheless, we have acquired a platform within the college and that’s a step forward.
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The elected officers of EPSiG were as follows: Chair: Riadh Abed (Sheffield) Treasurer: Agnes Ayton (Oxford) Newsletter and Website Editor: Paul St John-Smith (St Albans) The Aims and Objectives of EPSiG include raising awareness of the importance of evolutionary theory to psychiatry, encouraging research into the evolutionary psychiatry and providing a forum for psychiatrists and others to discuss evolutionary models, research ideas and data with fellow evolutionists. In addition the SIG aims to facilitate networking with academic institutions and evolutionary scientists, biologists, psychotherapists, psychologists as well as other disciplines such as philosophy and we intend to organise workshops, symposia and conferences on Evolutionary Psychiatry and related subjects both independently and as part of other international meetings e.g. WPA and RCPsych. buy generic levaquin
Over the next 12 months we plan to set up our own web pages as part of the college website thus taking advantage of the high Google ranking of the main college website. The web pages will include a database of articles and books, links to relevant websites as well as interviews with prominent evolutionary scientists and thinkers. In addition, we are planning to actively advocate within the college for the inclusion of evolutionary science into the MRCPsych syllabus (the main postgraduate qualification for psychiatrists in the UK) buy generic nexium . We will also aim to publish 2-4 issues of the SIG’s Newsletter during the first year and organize a whole day evolutionary symposium before the end of 2016.
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What is your definition of fitness?
The conventional mental illnesses occur at different ages in human life, and reflect different evolutionary fears.
Autism reflects the fear of predation. The little human child experiences its habitat as hostile, and prefers to remain in its own inner world, with its own language and its own responses. Sensible preventive measures include breast-feeding and imitation of the child’s responses, including, and perhaps especially, vocalisation.
The older human child who has negotiated fears of predation and who feels contained to a degree within its habitat may fear abandonment if its natural, instinctual responses, especially hostility, appear to be unwelcome. The child inhibits those responses so as to make family life at least workable and at most beneficial to other family members. The child conceals further natural, instinctual responses, so that these are not expressed and are therefore not subject to the developmental process. However, these adaptations become unworkable under the influence of the hormones of adolescence. States of arousal occur which the adolescent is unable to explain in terms of personal responses, because he or she has learnt to inhibit those responses. The corollary discharge which normally signals ownership has been lost. The adolescent concludes logically that the states of arousal are due to external influences. The consequent hallucinations are not perceptions without stimuli, they are apperceptions without responses. The concealed, cryptic responses emerge as delusions. Family members who have tried to create their child in their own image make matters worse, and need to be included in the treatment plan. Schizophrenia is an extreme expression of a discrepancy between the phenotype and the genotype.
The adolescent and young adult human who has negotiated fears of predation and fears of abandonment then has to negotiate fears of independence from the habitat wherein his or her natural, instinctual responses have been cultivated successfully. Depression is the experience of loss of dependence, while mania is a driven, uncultivated attempt to cope with that experience of loss. Family members who want this young, adult human’s childhood to go on forever make matters worse, and need to be included in the treatment plan.
The altricial human condition with respect to instinctual development has been consigned by evolution, specifically the loss of instinctual brain consequent upon deletion of the dorsal hippocampi by the corpus callosum, which deletion is likely to have been related to the greater emphasis on vision and audition and the lesser emphasis on olfaction consequent upon the assumption of an erect posture. Later in life, an adult human who has negotiated fears of predation, fears of abandonment and fears of independence, and who has acquired some territory, may deal with fears of the loss of that territory by the ascription of those fears to the responses of the human occupants of neighbouring territories. Family members and occupational counterparts who have not set clear limits during the life of this adult human make this paranoid development more likely, and need to be included in the treatment plan.
Fitness: is a central idea in evolutionary and sexual selection theories. Fitness can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment. In either case, fitness describes individual reproductive success and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by an average individual of the specified genotype or phenotype.
The term “Darwinian fitness” can be used to make clear the distinction with physical fitness. Where fitness is affected by differences between various alleles of a given gene, the relative frequency of those alleles will change across generations by natural selection and alleles with greater positive effect on individual fitness will become more common over time; this process is known as natural selection.Fitness component: Traits, such as survival, mating success, and reproduction, that combine to determine fitness.