Randolph Nesse writes in his wonderful book “Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry” (2019)
Schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder are very different diseases. Schizophrenia is a cognitive collapse in which every event is imbued with excess personal meaning and the inability to separate inner life from outer life gives rise to hallucinations and delusions. Autism is manifested in early childhood by a lack of social connectedness and solitary preoccupation with repeated motions and nonsocial thinking. Bipolar disease is the product of a broken moodostat that causes alternating periods of depression and mania. These are dire diseases.
Despite their differences, these diseases have overlapping features that make an evolutionary perspective especially useful. Each afflicts approximately 1 percent of populations worldwide. Each has milder forms that affect 2 to 5 percent of people. Vulnerability depends overwhelmingly on what genes a person has, but people with schizophrenia or autism have fewer children than other people. The evolutionary question is obvious: Why hasn’t natural selection eliminated the genetic variations causing these diseases?
The reason might be very simple, despite being less than obvious. The very same genes that make people susceptible also confer evolutionary advantages (analogous to sickle cell anemia/resistance against malaria). Giftedness and autism are the flip sides of the same genetic advantage: highly cooperative, intelligent, altruistic (high oxytocin) people.
In another post I have argued for a genetic basis of these traits in individuals I call intuitives (after the Myers Briggs test). Intuitives are only partially compatible with modern high competitive capitalism. They probably preserve a lot of the original hunter-gatherer genome and find it hard to live in a "farmer world".
The following graph shows the income distribution of different personality types. There is an almost inverse relationship between creative types (e.g. ISFP, INFP) and more pragmatic types (extraverted S types). The more intuitives correspond to the epitome of the capitalist personality (ESTJ) the better they function in this environment (see successful ENTJ/INTJ types).
The technically/logically innovative INTP (only 3% of the population, but 10% of people working at Google) only trail far behind, even though they are often found among university professors and scientists (Richard Dawkins, Einstein, Darwin). So, why aren’t they earning more? Simply because creatives aren't able to be productive 9- to 5. Therefore they don’t fit into the system and often become individuals at the edge of society, including hobos and non-functional autistic people.
The creative INFP/INFJs (Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain) are the epitome of the aesthetic creative mind and are at high risk for borderline, ADHD and bipolar.
The following graph illustrates the inverse relationship in giftedness of extremely creative and extremely practical, down to earth personalities.
Returning to Nesse’s quote from above
"Each afflicts approximately 1 percent of populations worldwide. Each has milder forms that affect 2 to 5 percent of people."
My hypothesis is that those introverted intuitives (INTP-INFJ) who make up about 10% of the general population are mostly among the 1% of people severely affected by mental disorders, whereas those people with milder forms will mostly be found in the groups “extraverted intuitives and introverted sensors).
In general, the more divergent personality types are forced into that ESTJ capitalist system, the more you can expect a host of problems from mental disorders to heightened stress symptoms with physiological consequences (eating disorders, hair loss, burnout, frequent sickness due to a deficient immune system). This happens due to an environmental mismatch (evolved mental environment and real environment). This also explains why intutitive people who are extremely successful in a capitalist environment suffer from mental disorders despite their material success.
This hypothesis can also explain the strange correlation between the father's age at the birth of the first child and autism/schizophrenia (see Randolph Nesse 2019). Introverted intuitives males are typically late bloomers and find relationships with non-introverted intuitives hard (the above giftedness chart might as well be a compatibility chart). Plus, intuitives tend not to want children in unsettled times. These factors make them typically the last among their peers to have children.
Creatives need a high oxytocin environment (social bonding, laughter, music, meditation) to thrive. High cortisol and testosterone environments (modern stressful work environments) make them work less well as well as sick, both mentally and physically.
Dedicated to my son Andrej, the most amazing child I have ever seen and to my brother Chris, a very creative person.
Dedicated also to my Ph.D. supervisor Dr. Peltzer-Karpf, who has always had an interest in creative people.
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