The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity Book

The central assertion of The Madness of Adam and Eve, a fine essay in evolutionary neurobiology from author and scientist David Horrobin, is that the terrible disease of schizophrenia is in some ways a concomitant to the uniqueness of man. Horrobin develops his sometimes daunting argument with finesse. In plain-spoken yet never condescending prose he begins by explaining how the first man-like hominids evolved from the ancient apes, how Homo Sapiens learned to walk tall, to speak proper, and to store fat in breasts and buttocks against the days of famine. The latter step might seem minor, but it is crucial to Horrobin's thesis. He believes that it is this special human "fattiness" that causes schizophrenia in our large, fat-hungry brains (which is, incidentally, why fat-rich Western societies experience more schizotypal illness than fat-poor Third World ones). The importance of all this, according to Horrobin, is that schizophrenia is both sister and father to the remarkable creativity of man; witness all the mad or near-mad geniuses there have been: Byron, Strindberg, Einstein, Joyce, Newton, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, for example. As might be gleaned from the above, this is not the easiest of books. The science is demanding, the argumentation often dense. But it is never less than absorbing, striking, and quite refreshingly clever.--Sean ThomasRead More