Two Sides of the Same Coin?

摘要

Scientists have long puzzled over the persistence of schizophrenia-a deleterious condition that by rights should have been pretty much bred out of the human gene pool.rnAt the Sackler Colloquium on Evolution in Health and Medicine held last week at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., evolutionary geneticist Bernard Crespi of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, threw some evolutionary firepower at the question. He proposes that both schizophrenia and autism are disorders of the "social brain"-but at opposite ends of the same spectrum. Psychiatrist Ezra Susser of Columbia University calls it an "imaginative proposal,… although I don't think it's supported yet by the data."