Seriously though, I am still developing my plan and have a little bit of time in which to make decisions. I am increasingly bent on the study of evolutionary psychopathology, but I am also very enthusiastic about addiction and the development of an addiction treatment model – ultimately in a fairly significant overhaul of our current social addiction paradigm.

Though I am also learning that these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

What I mean by the narrow focus comment though, is that I also have a rather profound interest in the evolution of religion and rudimentary culture, as well as several other aspects of evolutionary psych. I realize that I really have to increasingly focus myself as I progress – it doesn’t mean that I can’t damned well resent the necessity:)

On the upside, my partner is heading into bio-med. So as long as I can convince her to put up with me indefinitely, I will be pretty free to pursue an entirely academic career – yet live like a full time therapist. Though in all honesty, I am not sure I won’t spend quite a bit of time doing that too. I am actually pretty keen on practical applications and hell bent on our society dealing with addiction a hell of a lot more sensibly than we do now.

Sorry, I never got the chance to read Merlin Donald, though I do have his first book … if I only knew where! If I recall correctly, he is a respected scholar, and one of a cadre of writers on the evolution of language (cf. Pinker, Bickerton) who have not rigorously addressed the neuroanatomical substrates involved. And, academic nepotism aside (Deacon was my graduate advisor), “The Symbolic Species” is still considered THE watershed book on brain-language co-evolution: that’s why it’s still selling so strong after ten years. Terry Deacon is unique in terms of his dual neuroscientific and linguistic/semiotic expertise. Brown University’s engineer-turned-cognitive/linguistic neuroscientist Philip Lieberman has also researched the evolution of language, focusing initially on the vocal substrates and more recently on the role of the basal ganglia.

As for evolutionary psychology-cum-psychopathology, that is already a huge field. Your interest in evolutionary psychopathology strikes me as awesome; this is definitely one hot field these days, as is evolutionary medicine generally, and you may be able to do some pathbreaking work if you get into evolutionary psychopathology now, at a time when nearly every expert agrees that the DSM-IV (and soon to be substantially revised DSM-V) are pseudo-naturalistic, nosological nightmares (to put it kindly). Yet your concern about spreading yourself too thin is â?? as I, and I suspect Greg too can experientially confirm â?? the frustrating-but-legit flip side to the joy of intellectual eclecticism. Evolutionary psychopathology might look “narrow” to you at this juncture, but once you get more deeply immersed you’ll find it quite broad â?? not even a “moderate focus” at the Ph.D. level â?? and then your challenge will be to carve out a manageable sub-niche within it. Sorry, but that’s just the way academia works: you must learn more and more about less or less, or your career will be toast. One interesting thing about evolutionary psychopathology is that, if you play your cards right, you should be able without a whole lot of difficulty to combine clinical (= bread-winning) and research (= academic-career) tracks into some sort of dual degree. Of course, you’ll have to do some critical homework on WHERE to study “if and when” you do choose that route.

All other academic variables being equal, your most important considerations for graduate training in evolutionary psychopathology will be (a) the expertise of your mentor (graduate advisor); (b) your personal and intellectual fit with your mentor; (c) the sholarship/grant resources said mentor can funnel your way; and (d) his/her track record in turning out professionally successful scholars. (And alas, it is (c) â?? combined with whether or not your advisor has tenure â?? or, if not, might desert you half-way through your 6-year doctoral commitment â?? which may turn out to be paramount.) Whatever else you do, if you are serious about obtaining advanced training in this field, be sure to contact DR. MELVIN KONNER, MD, PhD., professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at Emory University for guidance/advice.

Back to Merlin Donald .. and other potentially useful readings. I’m not going to recommend the usual suspects in evolutionary psychology, as I’m sure you’ve already apprehended those on your own. But here are three books that I’ve found personally interesting and challenging although, I must warn you again, evolutionary psychology is definitely NOT my forte:***

1. Brune’s (2008) “Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry” http://www.amazon.com/Textbook-Evolutionary-Psychiatry-origins-psychopathology/dp/0199207682/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254032163&sr=1-1

2. McGuire and Troisi (1998) “Darwinian Psychiatry” http://www.amazon.com/Darwinian-Psychiatry-Michael-McGuire/dp/0195116739/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254032233&sr=1-1

3. Plotkin (1998) “Evolution in Mind” http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Mind-Introduction-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0674271203/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254032286&sr=1-1

â??â??â??â??â??â??â??â??
***Notwithstanding this disclaimer. I cannot resist mentioning that Greg and I (cue up a chorus of Auld Lang Syne) were Teaching Fellows for “Human Behavioral Biology,” a huge general-ed natural-science course taught at Harvard by Irv DeVore and Terry Deacon, back before Tooby and Cosmides were even toilet-trained. Ok, that last part’s an absurd lie: we’re not quite THAT antediluvian … OOPS! Gotta go wipe the drool off my keyboard.

It sounds like you are getting some personal satisfaction from the idea that people are getting ‘hot under the collar’ (not that there has been any sign of that here that I can see) – makes you feel ‘so not a racist’ and therefore superior to other people I guess.

But yes, you did imply there was a physical basis. It seems like you are now denying that you did so.

It seems like you are still calling me (or someone- who?) a racist – well, welcome to science blogs.

For reasons not entirely related to the current discussion, a couple of my profs have recommended both the Georg Striedter and Terrance Deacon texts you mention. I am curious what (if any) thoughts you have about Merlin Donald’s work on the evolution of consciousness. He was also recommended by my anthro prof and a couple of random internet commenters.

I should note that my interest is in evolutionary psych, which eventually (if and when I end up in academia) I wish to turn into an exploration of the evolution of abnormal psychology.I have definitively more interests than that, but I am hoping to stay moderately focused…

There isn’t any valid evidence in support of this idea. JPR’s work, referred to above, is the most vigorous attempt to correlate brain size with IQ (as one way to do it) and that required fudging the brain size data so “Africans” had smaller brains, and fudging the IQ data as well.

The only groups that seem to have different brain sizes among living humans are some forager groups, the data for which are being held hostage by the meanie blogger, but those data sets are so small as to not be definitive, and there are no IQ data. The meanie blogger, having lived with one of these groups for a couple of years, thinks they are really really smart, smarter than most people he’s met in Teh West before or since. But that is his own personal experience and when he says that to white western people they tend to get all hot under the collar because they don’t like getting intellectually outflanked by little black people who “still” live in the jungle and so on.

Actually my interest (before it was dampened by the hostile response to my question and accusations of racism) was in the existence of different relatively and absolutely sized brains in different human populations that may lead to differences in intelligence, as was alluded to earlier in this series.

Thanks for the links!

ABSTRACT: “Despite decades of research that has revolutionized the neurosciences, efforts to explain the major features of human brain evolution are still mostly based on superficial gross neuroanatomical features (e.g. size, sulcal patterns) and on theories of selection for high-level functions that lack precise neurobiological predictions (e.g. general intelligence, innate grammar). Beyond its large size we still lack an account of what makes a human brain different. However, advances in comparative neuroanatomy, developmental biology, and genetics have radically changed our understanding of brain development. These data challenge classic ideas about brain size, intelligence, and the addition of new functions, such as language, and they provide tools with which we can test hypotheses about how human brains diverge from other primate brains.” Hopefully you’ll have access to a library (or I.L.L.) for the Full Text.

Brain References Recommended by Joe (above)

Studying human brain evolution has been contentious ever since Darwin and Wallace famously disagreed on the extent to which the topic was even susceptible to scientific explication. [“Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace,” by Stephen Jay Gould, 1992. Chapter 4 in “The Panda’s Thumb” http://www.amazon.com/reader/0393308197?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib%5Fdp%5Fpt ]. But in one important sense all the problems and questions of this immense field differ not one whit from those in other academic fields: Facts need theories and vice versa. I’ll go one further and say there is no “factual” matter concerning human brain evolution, no matter how scrupulously circumscribed, that isn’t empowered or hobbled (and sometimes paradoxically both) by its associated principles.

It is with this truism in mind that I suggest that all would-be or already-committed [in- or out-of asylum] students of brain evolution, whether their primary interest rests in comparative intelligence, neuroanatomy, evolutionary psychology, paleoneurology, or brain-size allometry (etc.), not just read but OWN UC-Irvine Professor George F. Striedter’s text “PRINCIPLES OF BRAIN EVOLUTION” (2005, Sinauer) http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Brain-Evolution-Georg-Striedter/dp/0878938206 â?? Minimally, you should take advantage of Amazon’s “Click to look inside” feature at the foregoing url. This is by far the best (it may be the only) recent book-length treatment of our subject that lives up to its title. (John Allman’s theoretically eclectic (as opposed to synthetic), gorgeously illustrated “Evolving Brains” (2000, W.H. Freeman: Scientific American Library, 240 pp.) http://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Scientific-American-Library-Paperback/dp/071676038X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253852115&sr=1-1 is a distant runner-up.) Other indispensable reference books that address brain evolution principles and theories include, for example, Nieuwenhuys’s 2219-page synthesis of the past century’s comparative/evolutionary brain research, recommended in my earlier post (#14 above); this massive three-volume compendium is primarily organized taxonomically: it tries not to be hobbled by the scala naturae fallacy and mostly succeeds. In contrast, Butler and Hodos’s (2005) landmark textbook “Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy: Evolution and Adaptation” (Wiley-Liss, 744 pp) http://www.amazon.com/Comparative-Vertebrate-Neuroanatomy-Evolution-Adaptation/dp/0471210056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253848793&sr=1-1 is organized anatomically by brain regions: this is a well-written review of comparative neuroanatomy, jam-packed with black-and-white anatomical drawings, which you can dip into to discover how, for instance, hippocampal or cerebellar organization differs by vertebrate clade. Still other outstanding books address a specific problem in brain evolution, e.g., brain-language coevolution (e.g., Terrence Deacon’s Staley Prize-winning “The Symbolic Species” (1998, Norton) http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language-Brain/dp/0393317544/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253849270&sr=1-2); or perhaps argue for a prime mover as the cause of hominid neocortical expansion (e.g., climate change in William Calvin’s work, or social complexity in Robin Dunbar’s, etc.); or offer a comprehensive review of the entire field: e.g., David Geary’s (2005) “The Origin of Mind” (American Psychological Association, 459 pp.) http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Mind-Evolution-Cognition-Intelligence/dp/1591471818/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253849666&sr=1-1 This last book is invaluable as a wide-ranging critical review (e.g., 84-pages (!) of references), although a robust background in both cognitive neuroscience and neuroanatomy seems necessary to evaluate the author’s modular-intelligence arguments. [Cf. “Without a theory the facts are silent” (Friedrich August von Hayek) vs. Thomas Henry Huxley’s “… a beautiful theory … killed by an ugly factâ? vs. the second paragraph in my post.]

But back to Georg Striedter’s “Principles of Brain Evolution” â?? His ten chapter titles broadcast the strength of this book’s organization and content: Evolutionary Neuroscience: This Book’s Scope and Ambition; A History of Comparative Neurobiology; Conservation in Vertebrate Brains; Evolutionary Changes in Overall Brain Size; Evolutionary Changes in Brain Region Size; Evolutionary Changes in Brain Region Structure; Evolution of Neuronal Connectivity; What’s Special about Mammal Brains?; What’s Special about Human Brains?; and finally, Reflections and Prospect.

I should say outright that I have no academic or personal ties to Dr. Striedter (other than speaking once at a conference he chaired) and don’t necessarily agree with his strong cladistic approach. But his colloquially written, data-rich, allometrically, phylogenetically and developmentally informed 436-page book is (as advertised “advanced textbooks” go) small (9.5 x 7 x 1 inch thick, with a generous allocation of graphs, anatomical illustrations, even large margins. Hence very reader-friendly but â?? most importantly â?? a biologically sophisticated and painless PREREQUISITE, I feel, for delving into the more parochial and sometimes neuroanatomically naive articles on hominoid brain size that we’ve been alluding to in this thread. (Although you can always take the alternative route of pursuing your doctorate under one of the (in this country) dozen or so legitimate experts in human brain evolution … Let’s see: $60 for “Principles of Brain Evolution” vs. $300,000 (at least!) for a Ph.D. Hmmmmm.) Some of you guys might find it worrisome that Striedter’s own laboratory research focuses on fish and bird brains, but I think that’s a strength: especially when there is â?? to the best of my knowledge â?? no comparably superb or equivalently synthetic book-length treatment of hominoid brain evolution written (recently) by an anthropologist, even though four or five excellent book chapters do come to mind. (The examples most relevant to the discussions of this thread are Terrence W. Deacon’s 1997 “What makes the human brain different?” http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.337, and several more recent articles/book chapters by Emory University’s Dr. Todd Preuss http://research.yerkes.emory.edu/Preuss/index.html .)