A meeting held last month, “The evolution of language and the speciation ofHomo sapiens”, had a hidden agenda - a theory for the underlying biological cause of schizophrenia. According to this theory, schizophrenia stems from a failure to develop the normal asymmetric positioning, in the brain, of the language-processing centre (Broca's region). If this is so, a gene or genes involved in development would be implicated, and could in principle be identified. But resolution of the issue is unlikely to be so straightforward
