> I used to work [as a psychiatrist] in the business district of San Francisco, meaning I got to see a lot of very high-functioning people with mental disorders. I was constantly surprised how many people - while genuinely suffering from their conditions - also seem to be succeeding partly because of them. The bipolar programmer who is nonfunctional half the year, but his company keeps him on anyway because he codes at an absolutely superhuman level of brilliance while manic. The obsessive-compulsive cybersecurity expert who finds weaknesses everybody else missed. The endless line of autistic people succeeding in math-heavy jobs, exactly the way the stereotypes would predict.
>
> When I was in medical school, the joke (not really a joke) was that everyone with ADHD went into emergency medicine. I've since treated a couple of doctors with ADHD, and sure enough they are all in emergency medicine. But now I'm in the Bay Area, and the joke is that everyone with ADHD founds a startup. [...] though I should also mention just how disproportionately people with ADHD become salespeople. [...]
>
> (If it weren't for medical confidentiality laws, I think I could make a fortune running a combination psychiatric clinic / employment agency. [...] It'd be great!)
There seems to be a strategy of warping your views to match those of the dominant male in your household be it husband/father/son. Maybe this is a workable strategy that can be employed to great effect.
I think this is one of those cases of survivorship bias. You're not counting all of the crazy people who end up living in cardboard boxes. The husband's eventual good fortune was essentially random chance--he could just as easily have not been hurt, or died, or the community could have turned against him.
Certainly I see your argument--being just a little neurologically different can make people seek out underused economic niches, or to see connections others don't, or in this case, to believe their own nonsense. But being crazy tends to have a negative effect on competence and organization, which tends to have a negative effect on running a business or amassing wealth.
I remember a study I saw several years ago about the association between mental illness and reproduction in men and women, and basically everything was associated with a lower than average fertility rate except depression and maybe anxiety in women. (I don't remember if those were above average, or merely normal, but clearly they are not really in the same category of psychiatric illness as the others.)
Of course there could still exist a sub-category of people with sub-clinical levels of mental illness for whom tiny doses are actually good.
>>I remember a study I saw several years ago about the association between mental illness and reproduction in men and women, and basically everything was associated with a lower than average fertility rate except depression and maybe anxiety in women.
Whatever counts as crazy in mainstream modern Western society, will decrease fertility and other measures of success in modern Western society. That is why we call it crazy. But Gene doesn't really live in mainstream modern Western society. He lives in some kind of subculture, where his craziness just fits. That is why he doesn't have a, diagnosis - in his subculture he is not a pitiful person needing a label, but an inspiring person in a prominent position. For that reason, he is not included in any study of fertility and mental health.
I'm sure that there are genes floating around just waiting to end up in such a (sub)culture. If they do often enough, they persist. Otherwise, they disappear. Mathematically, it should be that way. A big like r and K selection, as Brian Moore suggested in another comment.
>>I think this is one of those cases of survivorship bias.
I can't contradict you. This particular case can be survivorship bias. But in general, to some degree, there must be genes that depend more on a lucky strike now and then, and genes that depend on even and steady propagation. And I think that some of the genes that depend on occasional lucky strikes cause what is called "crazy" in some environments.
IIRC, a study on domestic violence among the Ache found that how violent a man was toward his wife *wasn't* correlated with how violent he was toward other men. Wife-beating was disproportionately done by low-status men, whereas high-status men were more prone to violence against other men.
Very interesting! I can't find such a study: "Ache" is a very unfortunate name.
In theory, the prevalence of domestic violence should depend on women's opportunities to escape. Among the Yanomamö, it was easier to escape a low-status man in a smaller group, because such a man would get less help to force her back. That gave low-status men better incentives to behave. But I don't know about any study on the subject. So many questions that could have been asked in the wild times weren't asked.
Probably it was difficult to measure domestic violence among the Yanomamö since it was so prevalent. For example, one of Napoleon Chagnon's respondents, Kaobaweh, a headman, had a good relationship to his wife: He only beat her lightly. In an environment where all or most men beat their wives, I guess an anthropologist would have to set up a threshold between lighter violence and heavier violence to get any meaningful results.
On the other hand, in both modern Western society and Aché society (if that study I can't find but sounds very plausible is correct), mostly low-status men perpetrate domestic violence. In When Men Behave Badly, David Buss theorizes that it is a strategy to retain a mate who can't be made to stay voluntarily. Men who have lost social status since they married, or are much older than their partners, are much more likely to become violent. In Western society, hoping a woman will stay out of free will is option number one. Only if that option seems to fail, some men go to option 2 and become violent and scary.
In Yanomamö society, option number 2 was socially accepted. Which probably made it less associated with low status. It might be that most men applied it, and the high-status men could do so more credibly since they were very difficult to escape.
Thanks for the response! I'll have to look around more for the Ache study--I read about it years ago.
Interestingly, this ethnographic study of rural Pashtun women in 1970s Afghanistan ("Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive) said that, while it was impossible in practice for a woman to escape even lethal abuse by her husband, wife-beating was looked down on. It was seen as something a real man wouldn't have to resort to in order to control his wife.
>>Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive
Thank you for the book tip! What an annoying book. I'm yearning to know what these people thought, talked about, ate and were doing all day. And I get page after page of linage B and lineage C and blah blah blah. Like if Nancy Tapper doesn't dare to draw many conclusions, so instead she delivers details details details. (But in spite of my complaints, it is too bad that there is no list of anthropology books. Or is there?)
I can contrast it to Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, about Iraq in the 1950s. The other women were friendly to Elizabeth through offering to teach her to cook rice properly, "so your husband will not beat you". Once her female friends got the impression that her husband had actually beaten her. She denied it (in fact, a bird had fallen in her head when she slept outdoors and she screamed because she became so scared). The friends thought that was the worst lie ever and found it hilarious.
The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
>>The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Isn't it enough that wife-beating has obvious disadvantages for such a meme to spread? Some people say wife-beating if for losers > they beat their wives less > they get into fewer conflicts with wife's natal kin + become more attractive buyers of wives + they injure their wives and their reproductive capacity less.
>>Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham writes that at least among certain groups of Chimpanzees, all adolescent males batter all adult females of their group, in order to make the females submit. That way, females become the first targets of those males. I have never read that the highest status males avoid beating up females. But since female chimpanzees tend to favor the status quo, the incumbent often has little reason to be violent to them.
Depressingly, it doesn't seem to be the case that wife-beating actually harms a man's reproductive capacity, at least in all societies. Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
(I have to assume they were only seeing how violence affected the number of children a husband had *per wife*. If less-violent higher-status men had more wives, the general rule that high-status men have more children wouldn't have been violated. It also suggests that polygamy may have been a *mitigating* factor, at least in some societies, preventing maximal selection for male abusiveness.)
>>The book about women in Iraq sounds fascinating!
It is a very good book. It is difficult to believe that the protagonists have both died from old age. And Nancy Tapper's book is actually good too. I hope an AI will be able to rewrite it in the future, because it really deserves to be more readable than it is.
>>The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
Nah, why? We already know that we all have many, many shitty ancestors who became our ancestors just because they were shittier than average. Luckily there seems to be an opposite process where more prosocial people were selected. I think it is individual evolution on one side, group selection on the other side, and kin selection somewhere in between.
And let's do our best to contribute through not having children with wife abusers!
>>Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
David Buss reports that partner abuse is much more common among couples where the man is more than ten years older than the woman. The abusers might have chosen younger wives and thereby got more children.
And also, what if the abused wives had sex with their husbands more often because they were masochists?
It's possible that the fitness of various personality oddities depends not only on the nature of the local culture but on the frequency of those oddities. I once considered that all societies contain the devout, the believers, the doubters, the unbelievers, the scoffers, the mockers, and the blasphemers with regard to religion. This despite that one's degree of religiousity has a strong genetic component. But it's possible that it's a "balanced polymorphism", there are optimal proportions in a smoothly-working society and there's a selective advantage for being a type that happens to be under-supplied in your local situation. (Society needs a lot of believers in order to be smoothly-working but it also needs freethinkers to get around beliefs that happen to be counterproductive in unusual situations.)
> "Whatever psychological properties Gengis Khan had, they (probably) made him extremely reproductively successful."
There's an entire industry about this: "By the classical definitions of evolutionary fitness, Genghis Khan is among history's elite. The Mongolian ruler reportedly sired hundreds of children with a great variety of women—a feat of genetic propagation which echoes even today in the 8% of Asian men who still retain a nearly identical version of Genghis's Y chromosome."
My general observation is that the more of a 'misfit' (in society) a person is the more intelligent they need to be to survive and reproduce.
While they are not crazy, I am struck by the intelligence of groups such as the Huguenots and Jews who were discriminated against for their aberrant beliefs. Those who stuck with their beliefs had to be both resilient, or just plain stubborn, and more intelligent than most in order to survive. Those who weren't didn't contribute to the gene pool.
I'm not saying you're wrong (because I suspect you are right). But couldn't what you are describing be explained by very intelligent people being misfits because of their high intelligence? After all, smart kids don't have sex, (or kiss much, either) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X99000610
That is what Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran say about the Ashkenazi Jews in The 10 000 Year Explosion: Only the more intelligent ones could provide for a family without the right to cultivate the land.
I have wondered what could possibly be adaptive about schizophrenia. Why does it persist? Then I wonder if the genes that lead some individuals to create grossly distorted realities in their minds are connected to the ability to be creative.
Schizophrenia exists because half of the human genome affects the brain, and deleterious mutations tend to cause schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is likely a grab bag of "broken brain syndromes" which all manifest in similar ways; even though people with schizophrenia reproduce at about half the rate of controls, more random mutations appear every generation. Unfortunate it is indeed to contemplate that mother nature will never rid us of this disorder. :(
>[Faye] worked as a herbalist. When she started that business, she saw herbs just as supplements to ordinary medical care. But after the car accident caused her severe migraines, she came to believe wholeheartedly in the power of alternative, magic-style treatments
By "magic-style treatments" do you mean herbs again? Because herbs aren't exactly magical. They contain actual chemicals that have actual effects on the body. If there's any reason not to trust them, it's because said chemicals come in too small a concentration to have a big enough effect on the condition (depending on the herbs in question, I guess). They are not the same as reiki.
Faye had procedures like turning a vial x times one's thumb in order to transmit some kind of power to its contents. And she dealt with homeopathy. So it was a combination of physically existing herbal chemicals and magic.
Actually, I'd say that the border between "mental illness" and "evil" is to a considerable degree socially-defined. (OTOH, precisely because that distinction is socially-defined, I react to those two categories *in the way my society commands*.)
"Whatever psychological properties Gengis Khan had, they (probably) made him extremely reproductively successful."
You point this out, but it probably made him very unlikely to be successful, but the lucky convergence of his traits and his life situation made it work - we don't know about the lives of the 9,999 others with the same traits who didn't make it. If we executed everyone who didn't win the lottery, in a few generations we'd conclude look back and conclude that playing the lottery was a great strategy! This is where reversion to the mean and iterated strategies over generations matters - if GK's madness-adjacent traits were truly revolutionarily useful (and not just mostly bad, but sometimes one-in-a-million lucky,) and heritable, then his kids, who inherited 50% of them, should experience better reproductive outcomes. And certainly modern genetics reveals that may be the case.
I am not sure Gene's.... uh...... genes..... (for madness) will be as successful.
Right, but there's competition. Lottery genes that are only good 1/1000 times might spread, but only maximally in situations where Genghis Khan's can have disproprortionate ancestors. Overall, they might still get outcompeted over time by genes that are good more often - but certainly, it explains why we still retain genes that sometimes produce very bad outcomes, because very rarely they produce extremely good (from the gene's perspective) outcomes.
>>but certainly, it explains why we still retain genes that sometimes produce very bad outcomes, because very rarely they produce extremely good (from the gene's perspective) outcomes.
Yes! I think some kind of mathematical formula could be written over it.
Some genes are good in most environments, but do not make individuals outstanding in any known environment. Some genes are not very good in most known environments, but can make individuals outstanding in some environments.
There should be some kind of balance between genes that depend on more unusual but bigger reproductive events and genes that are generally positive but uneventful.
I feel this hook "Madness is adaptive" is completely misguided. What is happening is that people are worlding, world-building if you will as a type of social niche construction, and this urge and need to build some sort of psychic shelter (with other, against and/or witholding from others) is so strong that even if "mad" then worlding will be done (in the name of X if necessary), very much like people who are mad still breathe and eat. This story is an example of survivorship bias (as well of the urge to world/morally). Look, the mad one's get through. And the story of worldbuilding from those who do not? More on this POV at by "why we should" substack, but more originarily at https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
The creative aspect of madness is over-rated. It is a silly meme.
Scott Alexander has a relevant anecdote:
> I used to work [as a psychiatrist] in the business district of San Francisco, meaning I got to see a lot of very high-functioning people with mental disorders. I was constantly surprised how many people - while genuinely suffering from their conditions - also seem to be succeeding partly because of them. The bipolar programmer who is nonfunctional half the year, but his company keeps him on anyway because he codes at an absolutely superhuman level of brilliance while manic. The obsessive-compulsive cybersecurity expert who finds weaknesses everybody else missed. The endless line of autistic people succeeding in math-heavy jobs, exactly the way the stereotypes would predict.
>
> When I was in medical school, the joke (not really a joke) was that everyone with ADHD went into emergency medicine. I've since treated a couple of doctors with ADHD, and sure enough they are all in emergency medicine. But now I'm in the Bay Area, and the joke is that everyone with ADHD founds a startup. [...] though I should also mention just how disproportionately people with ADHD become salespeople. [...]
>
> (If it weren't for medical confidentiality laws, I think I could make a fortune running a combination psychiatric clinic / employment agency. [...] It'd be great!)
Love this post. I think there is a connection between Gene/Faye and David/Lupe:
https://people.com/david-archuleta-hell-again-lyrics-mom-left-mormon-church-reaction-8621943
There seems to be a strategy of warping your views to match those of the dominant male in your household be it husband/father/son. Maybe this is a workable strategy that can be employed to great effect.
I think this is one of those cases of survivorship bias. You're not counting all of the crazy people who end up living in cardboard boxes. The husband's eventual good fortune was essentially random chance--he could just as easily have not been hurt, or died, or the community could have turned against him.
Certainly I see your argument--being just a little neurologically different can make people seek out underused economic niches, or to see connections others don't, or in this case, to believe their own nonsense. But being crazy tends to have a negative effect on competence and organization, which tends to have a negative effect on running a business or amassing wealth.
I remember a study I saw several years ago about the association between mental illness and reproduction in men and women, and basically everything was associated with a lower than average fertility rate except depression and maybe anxiety in women. (I don't remember if those were above average, or merely normal, but clearly they are not really in the same category of psychiatric illness as the others.)
Of course there could still exist a sub-category of people with sub-clinical levels of mental illness for whom tiny doses are actually good.
>>I remember a study I saw several years ago about the association between mental illness and reproduction in men and women, and basically everything was associated with a lower than average fertility rate except depression and maybe anxiety in women.
Whatever counts as crazy in mainstream modern Western society, will decrease fertility and other measures of success in modern Western society. That is why we call it crazy. But Gene doesn't really live in mainstream modern Western society. He lives in some kind of subculture, where his craziness just fits. That is why he doesn't have a, diagnosis - in his subculture he is not a pitiful person needing a label, but an inspiring person in a prominent position. For that reason, he is not included in any study of fertility and mental health.
I'm sure that there are genes floating around just waiting to end up in such a (sub)culture. If they do often enough, they persist. Otherwise, they disappear. Mathematically, it should be that way. A big like r and K selection, as Brian Moore suggested in another comment.
>>I think this is one of those cases of survivorship bias.
I can't contradict you. This particular case can be survivorship bias. But in general, to some degree, there must be genes that depend more on a lucky strike now and then, and genes that depend on even and steady propagation. And I think that some of the genes that depend on occasional lucky strikes cause what is called "crazy" in some environments.
IIRC, a study on domestic violence among the Ache found that how violent a man was toward his wife *wasn't* correlated with how violent he was toward other men. Wife-beating was disproportionately done by low-status men, whereas high-status men were more prone to violence against other men.
I wonder if the Yanomamo were different here.
Very interesting! I can't find such a study: "Ache" is a very unfortunate name.
In theory, the prevalence of domestic violence should depend on women's opportunities to escape. Among the Yanomamö, it was easier to escape a low-status man in a smaller group, because such a man would get less help to force her back. That gave low-status men better incentives to behave. But I don't know about any study on the subject. So many questions that could have been asked in the wild times weren't asked.
Probably it was difficult to measure domestic violence among the Yanomamö since it was so prevalent. For example, one of Napoleon Chagnon's respondents, Kaobaweh, a headman, had a good relationship to his wife: He only beat her lightly. In an environment where all or most men beat their wives, I guess an anthropologist would have to set up a threshold between lighter violence and heavier violence to get any meaningful results.
On the other hand, in both modern Western society and Aché society (if that study I can't find but sounds very plausible is correct), mostly low-status men perpetrate domestic violence. In When Men Behave Badly, David Buss theorizes that it is a strategy to retain a mate who can't be made to stay voluntarily. Men who have lost social status since they married, or are much older than their partners, are much more likely to become violent. In Western society, hoping a woman will stay out of free will is option number one. Only if that option seems to fail, some men go to option 2 and become violent and scary.
In Yanomamö society, option number 2 was socially accepted. Which probably made it less associated with low status. It might be that most men applied it, and the high-status men could do so more credibly since they were very difficult to escape.
Thanks for the response! I'll have to look around more for the Ache study--I read about it years ago.
Interestingly, this ethnographic study of rural Pashtun women in 1970s Afghanistan ("Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive) said that, while it was impossible in practice for a woman to escape even lethal abuse by her husband, wife-beating was looked down on. It was seen as something a real man wouldn't have to resort to in order to control his wife.
This paper says that in ancient Greek culture (unlike ancient Roman culture, where women paradoxically had much more freedom), wife-beating was highly stigmatized. Part of it seems to have been the same attitude that it's contemptible to physically fight with a woman the way you would fight another man. Another theory was that, in more-egalitarian Roman culture, wives were seen as genuinely *threatening* their husband's control to a greater degree. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25096708.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3Abf42e6cda0dce7800dad49a9b5f3cc73&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1
>>Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive
Thank you for the book tip! What an annoying book. I'm yearning to know what these people thought, talked about, ate and were doing all day. And I get page after page of linage B and lineage C and blah blah blah. Like if Nancy Tapper doesn't dare to draw many conclusions, so instead she delivers details details details. (But in spite of my complaints, it is too bad that there is no list of anthropology books. Or is there?)
I can contrast it to Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, about Iraq in the 1950s. The other women were friendly to Elizabeth through offering to teach her to cook rice properly, "so your husband will not beat you". Once her female friends got the impression that her husband had actually beaten her. She denied it (in fact, a bird had fallen in her head when she slept outdoors and she screamed because she became so scared). The friends thought that was the worst lie ever and found it hilarious.
The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
>>The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Isn't it enough that wife-beating has obvious disadvantages for such a meme to spread? Some people say wife-beating if for losers > they beat their wives less > they get into fewer conflicts with wife's natal kin + become more attractive buyers of wives + they injure their wives and their reproductive capacity less.
>>Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham writes that at least among certain groups of Chimpanzees, all adolescent males batter all adult females of their group, in order to make the females submit. That way, females become the first targets of those males. I have never read that the highest status males avoid beating up females. But since female chimpanzees tend to favor the status quo, the incumbent often has little reason to be violent to them.
The book about women in Iraq sounds fascinating!
Depressingly, it doesn't seem to be the case that wife-beating actually harms a man's reproductive capacity, at least in all societies. Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
(I have to assume they were only seeing how violence affected the number of children a husband had *per wife*. If less-violent higher-status men had more wives, the general rule that high-status men have more children wouldn't have been violated. It also suggests that polygamy may have been a *mitigating* factor, at least in some societies, preventing maximal selection for male abusiveness.)
>>The book about women in Iraq sounds fascinating!
It is a very good book. It is difficult to believe that the protagonists have both died from old age. And Nancy Tapper's book is actually good too. I hope an AI will be able to rewrite it in the future, because it really deserves to be more readable than it is.
>>The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
Nah, why? We already know that we all have many, many shitty ancestors who became our ancestors just because they were shittier than average. Luckily there seems to be an opposite process where more prosocial people were selected. I think it is individual evolution on one side, group selection on the other side, and kin selection somewhere in between.
And let's do our best to contribute through not having children with wife abusers!
>>Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
David Buss reports that partner abuse is much more common among couples where the man is more than ten years older than the woman. The abusers might have chosen younger wives and thereby got more children.
And also, what if the abused wives had sex with their husbands more often because they were masochists?
It's possible that the fitness of various personality oddities depends not only on the nature of the local culture but on the frequency of those oddities. I once considered that all societies contain the devout, the believers, the doubters, the unbelievers, the scoffers, the mockers, and the blasphemers with regard to religion. This despite that one's degree of religiousity has a strong genetic component. But it's possible that it's a "balanced polymorphism", there are optimal proportions in a smoothly-working society and there's a selective advantage for being a type that happens to be under-supplied in your local situation. (Society needs a lot of believers in order to be smoothly-working but it also needs freethinkers to get around beliefs that happen to be counterproductive in unusual situations.)
> "Whatever psychological properties Gengis Khan had, they (probably) made him extremely reproductively successful."
There's an entire industry about this: "By the classical definitions of evolutionary fitness, Genghis Khan is among history's elite. The Mongolian ruler reportedly sired hundreds of children with a great variety of women—a feat of genetic propagation which echoes even today in the 8% of Asian men who still retain a nearly identical version of Genghis's Y chromosome."
But once that was discovered, people have been hunting for other such men. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/other-men-who-left-huge-genetic-legacies-likes-genghis-khan-180954052/ "Ten Other Men Left Genetic Legacies So Huge They Rival Genghis Khan’s; A new study shows that 10 other men founded large Y-chromosome lineages"
Very interesting link! Too bad we don't know anything about most of the superspreaders.
My general observation is that the more of a 'misfit' (in society) a person is the more intelligent they need to be to survive and reproduce.
While they are not crazy, I am struck by the intelligence of groups such as the Huguenots and Jews who were discriminated against for their aberrant beliefs. Those who stuck with their beliefs had to be both resilient, or just plain stubborn, and more intelligent than most in order to survive. Those who weren't didn't contribute to the gene pool.
I'm not saying you're wrong (because I suspect you are right). But couldn't what you are describing be explained by very intelligent people being misfits because of their high intelligence? After all, smart kids don't have sex, (or kiss much, either) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X99000610
That is what Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran say about the Ashkenazi Jews in The 10 000 Year Explosion: Only the more intelligent ones could provide for a family without the right to cultivate the land.
I have wondered what could possibly be adaptive about schizophrenia. Why does it persist? Then I wonder if the genes that lead some individuals to create grossly distorted realities in their minds are connected to the ability to be creative.
The conventional explanation is that if you can access distorted realities in your mind but not be dominated by them, they're a source of creativity.
Schizophrenia exists because half of the human genome affects the brain, and deleterious mutations tend to cause schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is likely a grab bag of "broken brain syndromes" which all manifest in similar ways; even though people with schizophrenia reproduce at about half the rate of controls, more random mutations appear every generation. Unfortunate it is indeed to contemplate that mother nature will never rid us of this disorder. :(
>[Faye] worked as a herbalist. When she started that business, she saw herbs just as supplements to ordinary medical care. But after the car accident caused her severe migraines, she came to believe wholeheartedly in the power of alternative, magic-style treatments
By "magic-style treatments" do you mean herbs again? Because herbs aren't exactly magical. They contain actual chemicals that have actual effects on the body. If there's any reason not to trust them, it's because said chemicals come in too small a concentration to have a big enough effect on the condition (depending on the herbs in question, I guess). They are not the same as reiki.
Faye had procedures like turning a vial x times one's thumb in order to transmit some kind of power to its contents. And she dealt with homeopathy. So it was a combination of physically existing herbal chemicals and magic.
I see.
Shawn wasn't mad at all, just a bully. You admit this yourself when you say he is ordinary.
Please stop using mental illness as a stand in for evil.
You clearly have a point.
Actually, I'd say that the border between "mental illness" and "evil" is to a considerable degree socially-defined. (OTOH, precisely because that distinction is socially-defined, I react to those two categories *in the way my society commands*.)
"Whatever psychological properties Gengis Khan had, they (probably) made him extremely reproductively successful."
You point this out, but it probably made him very unlikely to be successful, but the lucky convergence of his traits and his life situation made it work - we don't know about the lives of the 9,999 others with the same traits who didn't make it. If we executed everyone who didn't win the lottery, in a few generations we'd conclude look back and conclude that playing the lottery was a great strategy! This is where reversion to the mean and iterated strategies over generations matters - if GK's madness-adjacent traits were truly revolutionarily useful (and not just mostly bad, but sometimes one-in-a-million lucky,) and heritable, then his kids, who inherited 50% of them, should experience better reproductive outcomes. And certainly modern genetics reveals that may be the case.
I am not sure Gene's.... uh...... genes..... (for madness) will be as successful.
Yes, "Gene" is a slightly unlucky pseudonym for a man who does not believe in evolution.
>>the lucky convergence of his traits and his life situation made it work
Exactly. And with enough such lucky convergences, also genes that reduce fitness in most situations can spread.
Right, but there's competition. Lottery genes that are only good 1/1000 times might spread, but only maximally in situations where Genghis Khan's can have disproprortionate ancestors. Overall, they might still get outcompeted over time by genes that are good more often - but certainly, it explains why we still retain genes that sometimes produce very bad outcomes, because very rarely they produce extremely good (from the gene's perspective) outcomes.
>>but certainly, it explains why we still retain genes that sometimes produce very bad outcomes, because very rarely they produce extremely good (from the gene's perspective) outcomes.
Yes! I think some kind of mathematical formula could be written over it.
Some genes are good in most environments, but do not make individuals outstanding in any known environment. Some genes are not very good in most known environments, but can make individuals outstanding in some environments.
There should be some kind of balance between genes that depend on more unusual but bigger reproductive events and genes that are generally positive but uneventful.
related? https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/art-design/2024/03/the-last-crimes-of-caravaggio
How much "madness" is mimetic instead of genetic?
Perhaps something similar to R vs K selected species.
Actually, yes. There should be "r" genes lying under the surface, waiting for that unusual environment where they thrive exceptionally.
(speaking of Gene's genes, here is an article about him:
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2023/1/29/23575258/what-does-educated-tara-westover-family-think-about-reconciliation-book/
I feel this hook "Madness is adaptive" is completely misguided. What is happening is that people are worlding, world-building if you will as a type of social niche construction, and this urge and need to build some sort of psychic shelter (with other, against and/or witholding from others) is so strong that even if "mad" then worlding will be done (in the name of X if necessary), very much like people who are mad still breathe and eat. This story is an example of survivorship bias (as well of the urge to world/morally). Look, the mad one's get through. And the story of worldbuilding from those who do not? More on this POV at by "why we should" substack, but more originarily at https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
The creative aspect of madness is over-rated. It is a silly meme.