The New York Times has published a fascinating story on a new theory about the origins of mental disorders, one that sees it as the result of different genes in the same person struggling for dominance during the brain’s development.

The theory is definitely early in the testing stages and quite hypothetical at this point, but it does appear to have a good deal of explanatory power, the story notes.

An interesting angle is the theory’s agreement with recent thinking about how a variety of factors, including environmental ones, appear to affect the body’s expression and implementation of its genetic code.

This movement is an outgrowth of the sociobiology insight that species’ behavior patterns are affected by natural selection and thus reflect the evolutionary advantages of the behaviors in question. Recent innovations in genetic theory build on that observation by suggesting that environmental factors can also affect the expression of an individual creature’s genetic code. The new theory on the causes of mental disorders follows that skein of reasoning further.

This line of thinking has very interesting and important philosophical and cultural implications, and it is thus a scientific movement that bears watching.