Mental Illness as the Human Condition: Schizophrenia as an Echo of the Primitive Mind, Autism as a Marker of the Modern Brain
TL;DR: What we call “mental illness” often reflects the same evolutionary forces that built our species’ most distinctive abilities. Some liabilities may be the cost of our gifts. Schizophrenia risk clusters around ancient cognitive reflexes—pattern detection, agency inference, and social meaning-making—run amok. Autism liability clusters around traits of the modern brain—precision, systemizing, and deep-focus cognition—pushed past safe tolerances.
The human brain is a tightrope
Evolution rarely hands out free lunches. The cortex that lets us write symphonies and code also runs close to biological limits: energy, wiring, developmental timing, and error tolerance. Across populations, subtle shifts in gene regulation and thousands of tiny genetic variants nudge brain circuits toward either broader social inference or narrower precision. Most of the time, that’s just normal diversity. Sometimes, it crosses a threshold we label “disorder.”