Banging the drum: evolutionary and cultural origins of music and its implications for psychiatry.

SUMMARY: There is growing interest in music-based therapies for mental/behavioural disorders. We begin by reviewing the evolutionary and cultural origins of music, proceeding then to discuss the principles of evolutionary psychiatry, itself a growing a field, and how it may apply to music. Finally we offer some implications for the role of music and music-based therapies in clinical practice.

Evobiopsychosocial medicine.

The biopsychosocial model remains the de facto framework of current healthcare, but lacks causational depth, scientific rigour, or any recognition of the importance of evolutionary theory for understanding health and disease. In this article it is updated to integrate Tinbergen's four questions with the three biopsychosocial levels. This 'evobiopsychosocial' schema provides a more complete framework for understanding causation of medical conditions. Its application is exemplified by tabulating depression, rheumatoid arthritis and COVID-19 within its format, which highlights the direct research and practical applications uniquely offered by evolutionary medicine. An evobiopsychosocial framework can serve as a useful tool to introduce evolutionary concepts into mainstream medicine by highlighting the broad and specific contributions of evolutionary analysis to researching, treating and preventing health conditions, providing a suitable next step for the mainstream model of medicine.

How evolutionary science can help us understand vaccine refusal in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unvaccinated people have a mortality rate from COVID-19 that is 32-fold that of fully vaccinated people. Yet, in the UK, more than 4% of adults have not accepted a vaccine to protect them against COVID-19 and at the time of writing only 73% of people were fully vaccinated. Psychological and societal factors underlying vaccine hesitation or refusal are complex. In this paper, we use evolutionary science to help explain how vaccine refusal can be the result of an historic adaptation to protect against the repetition of past trauma, including, for many, that of systemic racism and/or deprivation, and misguided attempt to preserve fertility. We discuss some resulting cognitive biases and conclude with recommendations for practice.

Evolutionary biology: an essential basic science for the training of the next generation of psychiatrists.

Evolutionary science can serve as the high-level organising principle for understanding psychiatry. Evolutionary concepts generate new models and ideas for future psychiatric study, research, policy and therapy. The authors accordingly make the case for the inclusion of evolutionary biology in the postgraduate education of psychiatric trainees.

Evolutionary Considerations on the Emerging Subculture of the E-psychonauts and the Novel Psychoactive Substances: A Comeback to the Shamanism?

BACKGROUND: Evolutionary research on drug abuse has hitherto been restricted to proximate studies, considering aetiology, mechanism, and ontogeny. However, in order to explain the recent emergency of a new behavioral pattern (e.g. 'the e-psychonaut style') of novel psychoactive substances' (NPS) intake, a complementary evolutionary model may be needed. OBJECTIVE: A range of evolutionary interpretations on the 'psychonaut style' and the recent emergency of NPS were here considered. METHOD: The PubMed database was searched in order to elicit evolutionary theory-based documents commenting on NPS/NPS users/e-psychonauts. RESULTS: The traditional 'shamanic style' use of entheogens/plant-derived compounds may present with a range of similarities with the 'e-psychonauts' use of mostly of hallucinogen/psychedelic NPS. These users consider themselves as 'new/technological' shamans. CONCLUSION: Indeed, a range of evolutionary mechanisms, such as: optimal foraging, costly signaling, and reproduction at the expense of health may all cooperate to explain the recent spread and diffusion of the NPS market, and this may represent a reason of concern.

Evolutionary psychiatry: a new College special interest group.

Evolutionary science remains an overlooked area in psychiatry and medicine. The newly established Royal College of Psychiatrists' Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group aims to reverse this trend by raising the profile of evolutionary thinking among College members and others further afield. Here we provide a brief outline of the importance of the evolutionary approach to both the theory and practice of psychiatry and for future research.

Classical and novel psychoactive substances: rethinking drug misuse from an evolutionary psychiatric perspective.

In this article, ontogenetic and phylogenetic causes of drug abuse and links to human emotional development are considered. Some evolutionary perspectives (e.g. that under certain conditions, consumption of otherwise toxic alkaloids may confer both physical and cultural advantages) are reviewed. As described in the 'mismatch theory', the capacity of the human genome to evolve defences against toxins has been outstripped by the pace of cultural change and technological development, such as purposeful fermentation of alcohol and more recently distillation of alcohol; purification and chemical manipulation of plant alkaloids; and the engineering of entirely novel psychoactive substances (NPS). The functions of the neurobiological substrates that mediate substance misuse and dependence are reviewed. Reasons are given why NPSs present greater cause for concern than plant-derived substances of abuse. We argue that evolutionary biology provides an important orientation for the research agenda in substance misuse.