Keller & Miller/Evolutionary genetics of mental disorders: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== *** IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Keller-1011… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. NOTE: Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ** Please respond to this Call no later than February 21, 2006 ** ================================================================== CALL FOR COMMENTATORS ================================================================== Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article "Resolving the paradox of common, harmful, heritable mental disorders: Which evolutionarygenetic models work best?" by Matthew C. Keller and Geoffrey Miller This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Please DO NOT prepare a commentary unless you eventually receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= TITLE: Resolving the paradox of common, harmful, heritable mental disorders: Which evolutionary genetic models work best? AUTHORS: Matthew C. Keller and Geoffrey Miller ABSTRACT: Given that natural selection is so powerful at optimizing complex adaptations, why does it seem unable to eliminate genes (susceptibility alleles) that predispose to common, harmful, heritable mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder? We assess three leading explanations for this apparent paradox from evolutionary genetic theory: ancestral neutrality (susceptibility alleles were not harmful among ancestors), balancing selection (susceptibility alleles sometimes increased fitness), and polygenic mutation-selection balance (mental disorders reflect the inevitable mutational load on the thousands of genes underlying human behavior). The first two explanations are commonly assumed in psychiatric genetics and Darwinian psychiatry, while mutation-selection has often been discounted. All three models can explain persistent genetic variance in some traits under some conditions, but the first two have serious problems in explaining human mental disorders. Ancestral neutrality fails to explain low mental disorder frequencies and requires implausibly small selection coefficients against mental disorders given the data on the reproductive costs of mental disorders. Balancing selection (including spatio-temporal variation in selection, heterozygote advantage, antagonistic pleiotropy, and frequency-dependent selection) tends to favor environmentally contingent adaptations (which would show no heritability) or high-frequency alleles (which psychiatric genetics would have already found). Only polygenic mutation-selection balance seems consistent with the data on mental disorder prevalence rates, fitness costs, the likely rarity of susceptibility alleles, and the increased risks of mental disorders with brain trauma, inbreeding, and paternal age. This evolutionary-genetic framework for mental disorders has wide-ranging implications for psychology, psychiatry, behavior genetics, molecular genetics, and evolutionary approaches to studying human behavior. KEYWORDS: adaptation, behavior genetics, Darwinian psychiatry, evolution, evolutionary genetics, evolutionary psychology, mental disorders, mutation-selection balance, psychiatric genetics, quantitative trait loci (QTL). FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Keller-10112005/Referees/ ================================================================== *** IMPORTANT INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the new Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Keller-1011… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. NOTE: Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/associnst.html ** Please respond to this Call no later than February 21, 2006 ** ================================================================== ================================================================== Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------