{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02538560411311054, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0012853470437017994, 'mean_word_length': 5.056420233463035, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Troubled Helix: Social and Psychological Implications

everything, but without measurement of the intervening variables, the black bile and so on, they could not seriously be tested and would eventually be found wanting. Stevens and Price are on particularly thin ice when they try to make sense of schizophrenia. Their theory is a variant of heterozygote advantage, suggesting that individuals with schizotypy, which can be seen as a commonformefruste of schizophrenia, are selected for. That idea is not novel, but what is novel is the idea that schizotypic individuals are selected because their quasi-religious ideations make them effective and charismatic leaders, whose role is to split apart overly large human groups into smaller subgroups, taking their followers with them, which is to the advantage of the group as a whole. The authors are here unabashed 'group selectionists', despite acknowledging, as they put it, that group selection 'has had a bumpy ride'. So bumpy, in fact, that the vehicle has disintegrated under the strains to which it has been subjected, and hardly a serious worker currently believes in it. Here Mrs Thatcher was, for once, correct: in evolutionary terms, 'there is no such thing as society'. There are only individuals; but sometimes self-interest and the interests of the group can be made to coincide. Overall, this book is a brave attempt to ask the sort of questions in which psychiatry has traditionally not been interested but which must be addressed to make biological and cultural sense of its phenomena. Psychiatric illnesses, like all diseases, do not exist as God-given entities but occur because biological organisms are struggling for survival in a complex world of other organisms and, more particularly, because in a complex sociocultural world they are struggling to pass on their genes better than others of their own species (and it is intra-specific competition that is the engine that drives most neo-Darwinian theories). If, however, this book looks superficially neo-Darwinian, it is rarely actually that. One of the authors is a Jungian analyst, and the language of archetypes keeps recurring (most absurdly in an account of dreams); its ultimate source is the intra-psychic competition of the Freudian id, ego and superego, dressed up in 1950s ethology. The hallmarks of neo-Darwinian theory are mathematical and logical analysis, assessing whether novel genes can successfully 'invade' otherwise stable genetic systems, and empirical evidence to contrast separate theories. The former is entirely lacking in the present account, and the latter almost absent. When it does occur, as in the very brief account of why depression is more common in women, it is circumvented almost tautologically. Where evidence is particularly needed is with claims such as that charismatic leaders tend to be schizotypal; if so, do their relatives have an increased incidence of schizophrenia? Despite all these drawbacks the book is a provocative read, and even if one does not always believe the answers there is no doubt about the importance of the questions.