Emotional Fossils: Mental Illness and Human Evolution

This book-really an essay-is the culmination of forty-five years of thinking as a psychiatrist about the relationship between severe mental illnesses and human evolution. I realized that the evolution of upright posture, large molar teeth, opposable thumbs, and large brains were all cumulative responses to a decisive shift in what MOTIVATED early humans compared to apes. I describe in vivid detail how the inner experience of major depression, panic disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder can be interpreted as emotional fossils that illustrate the ape-hominid evolutionary transformation in the mind. This understanding of how our motivations evolved not only allows you to make sense of hominid fossil finds, now with DNA, but offers a simple empathetic understanding of how self-awareness and language work.Although short and explicitly written to be accessible, this essay offers a post-Darwinian world view that is fundamentally optimistic and progressive.

• | Author: John V. Wylie MD
• | Publisher: John Wylie
• | Publication Date: January 01, 2020
• | Number of Pages: 150 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0578601672
• | ISBN-13: 9780578601670