The aims of the Section on Evolutionary Psychiatry (EP) include raising awareness of the importance of evolutionary biology to psychiatry and encouraging research into domains that can be meaningfully understood if viewed from an evolutionary perspective. These include gene-environment interactions, ecological aspects, social inter-actions and nonverbal behaviour, and the interactions between the immune system, the microbiome, and the central nervous system.

The section fosters cross-disciplinary networking with evolutionary scientists across a range of academic specialities as well as collaboration with national EP associations around the world. Our section advocates for the inclusion of evolutionary biology as a basic science into both undergraduate medical education and psychiatric training curricula around the world. The evolutionary approach seeks to extend the concept of causation to incorporate phylogenetic as well as adaptational (functional) causes of mental disorders (referred to as ultimate causes) alongside the proximate causes familiar to current mainstream psychiatry.