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Evolutionary psychopathology
Evolutionary Developmental Psychopathology
by
Ian Pitchford
University of Sheffield
Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies
School of Health and Related Research
16 Claremont Crescent
SHEFFIELD
S10 2TA, UK
September, 2001
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Evolutionary Developmental Psychopathology
by
Ian Pitchford
Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Genealogical Actors in Ecological Roles
3
Chapter 2. The Separation of Contradictory Things
7
Chapter 3. The Problem of Classification in Psychiatry
35
Chapter 4. Evolution and Human Nature
71
Chapter 5. The Society of Mind
107
Chapter 6. Evolutionary Developmental Psychopathology
154
Bibliography
228
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Genealogical Actors in Ecological Roles
Surely the way to encourage people to think about their lives and
to improve them is not to replace one set of coercive determinants
with another, and surely the way to think about responsible action
is not to juggle inner and outer, ultimate and proximate causes,
and hope that reasons and responsibility will miraculously
squeeze through some narrow space where causes collide in per-
sons.
(Oyama, 1985, p. 16)
People, like all other organisms, are not evolved to maximise
health, wealth, happiness or any other trait – but to have descen-
dants, which is the continuation of life.
(Chisholm, 1999, p. 48)
How can psychiatric nosology 1 generate an epistemic benefit, and can a scien-
tific taxonomy of mental disorders ever be entirely coextensive with a clinical
taxonomy of such disorders? I shall argue that useful taxonomic concepts for a
science of psychopathology are those representing projectable categories, and
that such categories delineate natural kinds , or non-arbitrary aspects of the
world. I shall also argue that because our attitude towards the treatment of dis-
orders or problems of any kind necessarily involves a complex psycho-social
cost-benefit analysis, clinical taxonomy will always reflect a nonepistemic
agenda that is itself mutable according to the strictures of prevailing norms and
resources. These considerations imply that the search for a single psychiatric
taxonomy based on the natural and human sciences and capable of accommo-
dating the needs of both clinicians and researchers could be futile, and that a
clear acknowledgement of the differing ends of psychiatric treatment and re-
search into psychopathology should be a starting point in the classification of
mental disorders.
1 Nosology is the branch of medicine concerned with the classification and description of dis-
eases.
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Recent attempts to promote the extension of evolutionary theorising to human
psychology and behaviour have awakened renewed interest in a field variously
called Darwinian psychiatry (McGuire & Troisi, 1998), evolutionary psychopa-
thology (Baron-Cohen, 1997), or evolutionary psychiatry (Stevens & Price,
1996). According to some of its most prominent practitioners this discipline ‘in-
troduces a broad and much needed deductive framework; it facilitates the func-
tional analysis of behaviour; it identifies important differences between ultimate
causes and proximate mechanisms, [and] it promotes a reassessment of cur-
rent views about aetiology and pathogenesis’ (McGuire, et al., 1992, p. 89).
However, drawing as it does on the concerns of human sociobiology (Wilson,
1975; 1978), much of the work in evolutionary psychopathology has concen-
trated on the study of adaptive behaviours ‘such as acquiring a mate, sexual
intercourse, having offspring, parent-offspring bonding, stranger anxiety’ and
other ‘general behaviour profiles and patterns of human behaviour… set by the
species’ genome [which], within limits, unfold in predictable ways’ (McGuire, et
al., 1992, p. 90).
Although it is certainly correct that ‘human physiology is importantly influenced
by selective forces’ (Sterelny, 1992, p. 156), which is all that human sociobiol-
ogy requires as a basic justification, there is a serious epistemic asymmetry be-
tween animal sociobiology and human sociobiology owing to the fact that hu-
mans are long-lived and unavailable for scientific manipulation in the form of
controlled breeding experiments. Another problem in considering particular hu-
man behaviours as adaptive is the human capacity to replicate learned behav-
iour through cultural means. Although our culture and social institutions may re-
flect aspects of our evolved psychological mechanisms (Boyer, 1994; Sperber,
1996), our behaviour is certainly
…the result of perceptual inputs, our learning history, and very
complex interactions between distinct psychological mecha-
nisms… very little human behaviour is the result of a specialised
capacity, built by genes that have proliferated in virtue of their abil-
ity to build the device that produces the behaviour. In us, if func-
tionalism is right, there is nothing like a one-one correlation be-
tween behaviours and mechanisms (Sterelny, 1992, p. 168).
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Crawford argues for the distinction between innate adaptation , the genetically
encoded design for the development of proximate mechanisms, and operational
adaptation , the phenotypic psychological processes actually producing the be-
haviour (Crawford, 1993). Inasmuch as the environment in which the phenotype
develops differs significantly from the environment of evolutionary adaptedness
an operational adaptation may be typified by entirely novel features, and may
contribute to behaviours having little bearing on lifetime reproductive success
(LRS). Consequently, as Sterelny suggests ‘we need from sociobiology an evo-
lutionary psychology, not an evolutionary theory of human behaviour’ (1992, p.
170). Two of the field’s early advocates, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, argue
that to embrace evolutionary psychology
…means shedding certain concepts and prejudices inherited from
parochial parent traditions: the obsessive search for a cognitive
architecture that is general purpose and initially content-free; the
excessive reliance on results derived from artificial “intellectual”
tasks; the idea that the field’s scope is limited to the study of
“higher” mental processes; and a long list of false dichotomies re-
flecting premodern biological thought – evolved/learned,
evolved/developed, innate/learned, genetic environmental, bio-
logical/social, biological/cultural, emotion/cognition, animal/human.
Most importantly, cognitive scientists will have to abandon the
functional agnosticism that is endemic to the field (Cosmides &
Tooby, 1994, p. 42).
Evolutionary psychology eschews what it regards as the behavioural determin-
ism of sociobiology, but it does, however, retain a commitment to a modified
genetic determinism (of mechanisms rather than behaviour) which may itself
obscure a full appreciation of human psychological plasticity and the intricacies
of development. To borrow a phrase from David Hull (1987) we need to re-
member that human beings are genealogical actors in ecological roles , and a
large portion of this work constitutes a consideration of ways in which we should
perceive the contribution of genes and ecology to our evolved psychology. How
then should we conceive of ‘evolutionary psychology’? What concepts and de-
bates characterise this field? How does it relate to other disciplines? What does
it have to say about psychiatric classification and mental illness?

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