Historical contingencies in the evolution of human behavior and psychopathology

Psychopathology may be understood as a product of evolution. Uniquely human capacities, such as human language and creative thinking, evolved out of a matrix of other capacities, including ancestral forms of learning. Applying evolutionary theory to the human nervous system, one might expect to find preexisting forms of learning in some form of coexistence with the recent evolutionary development of human symbolic functioning. A theory is presented in this paper which lays the groundwork for the claim that psychopathology may be understood as the product of interactions between adaptive schemes of different evolutionary origins. While earlier notions about evolution have been used to explain psychopathology (Freud 1913), this paper constitutes a reapplication of evolutionary theory to the problem of psychopathology from a modern perspective.