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Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
The mean value of the trait is thus set slightly below the cliff, ensuring that most individuals remain fit, but due to inevitable variation, a small fraction will fall over the edge and become ill. What matters is not whether there's one trait under selection but whether these variants, in aggregate, follow the pattern predicted by the cliff-edge model: conferring incremental benefits across most of the distribution but leading to a sharp drop in fitness once a threshold is crossed. When these positively selected genes were analyzed for biological pathways, most of the significant hits were involved in cell-to-cell communication—particularly through cadherin signaling, which plays a key role in neural connectivity and synaptic plasticity.
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