Schizophrenia = overheating engine?

Proceedings of the Royal Society B has a paper out which reports evidence of positive selection on genes which seem to have some relationship to the heritability of schizophrenia (Nature has a good summary). The authors imply that the genes in question were likely selected for reasons totally unrelated to schizophrenia, but that the new variants increase susceptibility toward the disease. This is understandable, rapid selective bursts can result in the increase in frequency of alleles which might have negative side effects that are on the balance erased by the benefits which they confer (a natural outcome of pleiotropy). An engine which is pushed to its limits can accelerate faster and maintain a higher constant velocity, but it is also more likely to overheat or malfunction in some manner. Over time one assumes that engineers can design systems which can produce all the positive effects while masking or eliminating the negative one, but such improvements take time. And so it is with evolution. It seems that our species (H. sapiens that is) has been subject to very powerful bursts of selection of late. A possible consequence of this is that a host of deleterious phenotypic outcomes which have yet to be purged by the reshaping hand of selection may also emerge concomitantly. Adaptive evolution wins in the long run, but over the shorter time scale the noise of maladaptive correlated response is something that needs to be remembered.

Note: Yes, I know schizophrenia is a complex disease, and genes do not tell the whole story in all likelihood.

Tags

More like this

Update on paper access: You can get it here already. Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution: Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we…
Many months ago I was reviewing R.A. Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection when I touched upon his view of the nature of adaptation, precisely, that it occurs though the substitution of mutations of small effect. This dovetails with the "gradualism" which Charles Darwin promoted, and…
A few months ago I reviewed David Goldstein's Jacob's Legacy, a geneticists look at the history of the Jewish people. Today The New York Times has a piece, A Dissenting Voice as the Genome Is Sifted to Fight Disease, which profiles Goldstein and uses his own positions and opinions as a jumping off…
Just a reiteration on prosopagnosia. Let's assume that the findings as to the extent of face blindness pan out (I am willing to grant they found something seeing as there was an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance in the pedigree). 1) I am skeptical that the 2% frequency in the population is…

We don't even know that schizophrenia is a disease, or even that it's a disease at all. Would you say that a computer infected by a virus is experiencing a hardware failure?

In most cases, we don't have enough information on the validity of our psychiatric categories to draw any kind of useful conclusions at all, save that our reach is far exceeding our grasp.

By Caledonian (not verified) on 06 Sep 2007 #permalink

the definition of disease is like species, it's instrumental. when you have your schizophrenic roommate beat the shit out of you because you raped a non-existent woman named angela, you probably think something is very wrong and it is a disease (this happened to someone in my dorm, his roommate went off his meds).

I heard the APA was chucking "schizophrenia" cause it was too much of a catch-all.