A joint history of the nature of genetic variation and the nature of schizophrenia

Abstract

This essay traces the history of concepts of genetic variation and schizophrenia from Darwin and Mendel to the present. For Darwin, the important form of genetic variation for evolution is continuous in nature and small in effect. Biometricians led by Pearson agreed and developed statistical genetic approaches utilizing trait correlations in relatives. Mendel studied discontinuous traits and subsequent Mendelians, led by Bateson, assumed that important genetic variation was large in effect producing discontinuous phenotypes. Although biometricians studied 'insanity', schizophrenia genetics under Kraepelin and Rüdin utilized Mendelian approaches congruent with their anatomical-clinical disease model of dementia praecox. Fisher showed, assuming many genes of small effect, Mendelian and Biometrical models were consilient. Echoing prior conflicts, psychiatric genetics since then has utilized both biometrical models, largely in twins, and Mendelian models, based on advancing molecular techniques. In 1968, Gottesman proposed a polygenic model for schizophrenia based on a threshold version of Fisher's theory. Since then, rigorous studies of the schizophrenia spectrum suggest that genetic risk for schizophrenia is more likely continuous than categorical. The last 5 years has seen increasingly convincing evidence from genome-wide association study (GWAS) and sequencing that genetic risk for schizophrenia is largely polygenic, and congruent with Fisher's and Gottesman's models. The gap between biometrical and molecular Mendelian models for schizophrenia has largely closed. The efforts to ground a categorical biomedical model of schizophrenia in Mendelian genetics have failed. The genetic risk for schizophrenia is widely distributed in human populations so that we all carry some degree of risk.