The DSM – an indicator of evolution?

From Wikipedia – “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by the American Psychiatric Association and provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders.” Currently in its fourth revision, it covers 297 disorders and is 886 pages long. It should be noted that this is mostly used in the US.  I would imagine similar dictionaries exist in other countries, but the DSM is a good tool for this post.

So what does the DSM have to do with evolution? I have a theory that they may be linked.

We tend to believe that evolution moves in slow cycles. After all it took about a 100,000 years to develop the human brain, the neocortex on top of the limbic system on top of the reptilian brain. I wonder if it’s really the case that evolution moves so slow. After all, we can’t really see it even though DNA may be changing. In fact nature has even more opportunities to play with a population of seven billion humans and about half million new babies born each day. With the rate of change everywhere in human society, doesn’t evolution have to keep up somehow?

What if, what if the DSM is one description of nature’s play? Of nature’s attempt to further evolution? To change human DNA for the next shift, the next leap? Granted most of the conditions in the DSM are not ones we would hope are the future of the human species, but maybe they provide clues for nature. They could just be experiments.

Of course there is no dictionary of the flip side – of the developments in human consciousness. The psychics, the energy healers, telepathic, clairvoyants, precognitives, clairaudiants, psychokinetics, geniuses – maybe they are as much as experiment as those with bi-polar disorder, ADHD, or anything else described in the DSM.

I have no basis for any of this, but it’s fun to speculate, to throw out a different idea. Humans are changing and human culture is changing, but it’s difficult to see that when we as humans are part of that.