Maybe great scientific advances tend to be made by people whose odd personalities stop them achieving success in academia and are good subjects for a boook. To have a preoccupation with some religious theme is not that uncommon among geniuses; Newton and Price trying to predict events from the Bible for example. CH Waddington was the opposite in that he was a very succesful academic, how does his scientific contribution stack up against Price's ?

The men who chose to be in polyandrous relationships may have been doing so because it was that or nothing; those men will never marry now (given the excess of males in India).

How can someone be a psychopath if they never get into trouble; you might as well say there are lots of schizophrenics who always behave perfectly normally. Here is a card carrying psychopath James "Fur" Sammons

hmoore, consider two fathers Married man who preferentially spends time and money with wife and kids. Married man who prefers to be out pounding beers and trying to pick up women. Which one of the above would be most likely to have a homosexual brother? All the instincts are far weaker in humans than in animals so I can see that the attenuated drives of humans may be more easily neutralized by an environmental interference such as infection. But why would instincts so often be not just nullified but inverted in such a specific way. Asexual men are orders of magnitude less common than one very specific orientation so there is some kind of selection going on - in bugs or people.

I don't accept the analogy with fish. It would indeed be very surprising if fish showed a non workable fertilizing behavior because fertilising is all they do so there would be no way for genes causing such behavior to compensate for the fitness deficit in other ways in (male) fish. Humans males have a lot to do with their children and in circumstances where male provisioning was crucial genes 'for' increased male provisioning which sometimes resulted in outright homosexuality could have given enough of a fitness advantage to outweigh the occasional (2%) individuals in who provisioning genes resulted in a total failure to procreate.

If 'a few percent of birds flew north – or east – for the winter' it would make me think that such behavior had once paid off big time. It would be surprising if a bug had no other effect than to make them fly north or east - unless flying north was connected with them getting infected with the bug in the first place.

"these findings do not suggest that homosexuality is a biological “disorder”. Conditions are only defined as a disorder if they have a negative impact on someone’s life – by this definition, homosexuality is only a disorder if society’s reaction makes it one' Your main argument in relation to schizophrenia was the perfectly reasonable one that - "natural selection only cares how many offspring you have who survive to reproduce themselves". ( though it is the relatives of schizophrenics (the 'schizotypal') who are hypothesized to have some fitness advantage) This post is saying the opposite and in effect arguing that wrecking fecundity is not a relevant criterion for deciding if something is a disorder. Sorry, but if homosexuality is normal so is schizophrenia; they are both far more common than any genetic disease. Saying free will does not exist in relation to sexuality makes one wonder if that is a special case or if you are suggesting that there is no such thing as free will. Even if nobody believed in free will in relation to anything there would still be sexual orientations regarded as disorders and greatly disapproved of and the disapproval of society is an effective way of curtailing undesirable behavior. Very few people get to go through life without their sexual behavior being criticized.

"These include mutations in single genes as co-called copy number variants (CNVs) – deletions or duplications of chunks of a chromosome that may contain more than one gene – including recurrent CNVs at 1q21.1, 15q11.2, 15q13.3, 16p11.2, 22q11.2 and about thirty others. In all these cases, such mutations are associated with increased risk not to just one disorder but to many." Crespi recently used copy number variation to test models of mental illness like subsumed, separate, overlapping and found that that autism and schizophrenia are over aganst one another: at 4 places in the genome deletions pre-dispose to one, while duplications pre-dispose to the other. To me that means they are not the same thing at all.

One don't need the insight of George Price or Isaac Newton to think those with classic signs of a schizophrenia spectrum disorder such as intense interest in finding hidden meanings in the bible - like Price and Newton - share genetic etiology as well as phenotypic end-point with others similarly afflicted If bipolar is subsumed into schizophrenia spectrum that is hardly evidence for the idea that any one of large number of possible mutations are resonsible for what is still a restricted range of symptoms. This post almost seems to be adopting an 'anti psychiatry' viewpoint but these well established rubrics are far better supported than the mutations hypothesis.