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History is not always what it ought to be. By rights, Galileo should have had Foucault's pendulum to prove that the Earth turns, and Darwin—not Mendel—should have discovered genetics. Instead of introducing an arbitrary term to avoid it, Einstein should have boldly predicted the expanding universe, and so on. No one knows what the future will say of our times, but if history were the way it should be rather than the way it is, some may look back and think that the late Bill Hamilton (left)—had he lived—should have been the author of The Imprinted Brain, subtitled How Genes Set the Balance of the Mind between Autism and Psychosis.
Hamilton was the originator of the so-called "selfish gene" view of modern Darwinism which Richard Dawkins famously popularized in the book of that title. The critical findings described in The Imprinted Brain only emerged after Hamilton's untimely death in 2000, and no one knows how differently things would have worked out had he lived. At the very least, Hamilton's own acknowledged autistic tendencies described in the book and his ground-breaking insights into genetic and mental conflict would surely have made the theory outlined in it of enormous interest to him, and—who knows?—he might even have been the first to formulate it, so naturally does it follow from the lead he gave. But history, alas, is not always as it should be, and men of genius like Hamilton do not always live to reap the harvest which should have been theirs. Nevertheless, he was the one who laid the foundations on which his heirs have built.
I say heirs because The Imprinted Brain is heavily indebted to a pupil of Hamilton's, Bernard Crespi, who is now Killam Research Fellow in the Department of Biosciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Prof Crespi emailed me in 2004 regarding a book which I had written, but which was never published, entitled The Maternal Brain and The Battle of the Sexes in the Mind. That manuscript was the culmination of a long, twenty-year struggle I had undertaken to reconcile classical Freudian psychoanalysis with modern evolutionary science. The final, definitive formulation of this idea was set out in a paper I published in 1999 arguing that the Freudian id might be seen as the psychological agent of paternally-active imprinted genes (that is those which are expressed only from the father's copy) and the ego as that of maternally-active genes. Such genes are in conflict because only the mammalian mother pays the costs of gestation, childbirth, and lactation, whereas the father gets all the benefit without any biologically-obligatory cost—beyond a single sperm!
However, by the time Prof Crespi contacted me in 2004 I was finally free of the Freudian delusion thanks to discovering autism research and its stunning insights into the mind. Now I realized that I had got the genetics right but the psychology wrong, and I replied to Crespi that I now thought that paternally-active genes might explain autism, whereas maternally-active and X chromosome genes (whose pattern of expression is also skewed in favour of the mother in certain respects) might explain paranoia. This was an extension of an idea about the antithetical pattern of the symptoms in autism and paranoia that I had just published online in 2002 and later in a of a book on evolutionary psychology edited by another colleague at Simon Fraser, Prof Charles Crawford.
To my astonishment, Crespi took me seriously, and we began a collaboration which led to two major scientific papers [1] [2], an essay piece in Nature, and finally to The Imprinted Brain. Prof Crespi took up the idea that imprinting might underlie autism and paranoia and both generalized it to include psychosis in general and did much to secure its factual foundations. Without his help, I would have proceeded much more slowly and uncertainly, and probably missed many important insights altogether-particularly where genetics and brain science are concerned. I am deeply indebted to him for the result, but neither of us could have done this without Hamilton and his fundamental insights into genetic conflict and the mind.
