CRIMINAL MINDS

Beginning in the 1990s, behavioral scientists—that is, people who study mind, brain, and behavior—began to take the theory of evolution seriously. They began to borrow techniques developed by the evolutionary biologists and apply them to problems in mind, brain, and behavior. Now, of course, virtually all behavioral scientists up to that time had claimed to endorse evolutionary theory, but few used it to study the problems they were interested in. All that changed in the 1990s. Since that pivotal decade, breakthroughs in the behavioral and brain sciences have been constant, rapid, and unremitting. The purpose of the Brain, Behavior, and Evolution series of titles published by ABC-CLIO is to bring these new breakthroughs in the behavioral sciences to the attention of the general public. In the past decade, some of these scientific breakthroughs have come to inform the clinical and biomedical disciplines. That means that people suffering from all kinds of diseases and disorders, particularly brain and behavioral disorders, will benefit from these new therapies. That is exciting news indeed, and the general public needs to learn about these breakthrough findings and treatments. A whole new field called evolutionary medicine has begun to transform the way medicine is practiced and has led to new treatments and new approaches to diseases, like the dementias, sleep disorders, psychiatric diseases, and developmental disorders that seemed intractable to previous efforts. The series of books in the Brain, Behavior, and Evolution series seeks both to contribute to this new evolutionary approach to brain and behavior and to bring the insights emerging from the new evolutionary approaches to psychology, medicine, and anthropology to the general public. The Brain, Behavior, and Evolution series was inspired by and brought to fruition with the help of Debora Carvalko at ABC-CLIO. The series editor, Dr. Patrick McNamara, is the director of the Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory in the Department of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. He has devoted most of his scientific work to the development of an evolutionary approach to problems of sleep medicine and to neurodegenerative diseases. Titles in the series will focus on applied and clinical implications of evolutionary approaches to the whole range of brain and behavioral disorders. Contributions are solicited from leading figures in the fields of interest to the series. Each volume will cover the basics, define the terms, and analyze the full range of issues and findings relevant to the clinical disorder or topic that is the focus of the volume. Each volume will demonstrate how the application of evolutionary modes of analysis leads to new insights into the causes of disorder and functional breakdowns in brain and behavior relationships. Each volume, furthermore, will be aimed at both popular and professional audiences and will be written in a style appropriate for the general reader, the local and university libraries, and graduate and undergraduate students. The publications that become part of this series will, therefore, bring the gold discovered by scientists using evolutionary methods to understand brain and behavior to the attention of the general public, and ultimately, it is hoped, to those families and individuals currently suffering from those most intractable of disorders— the brain and behavioral disorders.