Overall Abstract Cognitive abilities are widely regarded as the traits that most distinguish humans from other animals. The evolution of cognitive abilities has been studied for a long time by the fields of neuroanatomy and psychology, and only recently has become tractable by evolutionary genetics. Comparative genomic approaches have permitted the deep study of a handful of genes involved in cognition and language, of which the most notable is probably FOXP2. However, the intrinsic poligenicity of cognitive phenotypes has hindered progress in this area. In 2009, Konopka and Geschwind (Neuron 21: 231–244) reasoned that comprehensive evolutionary analyses in cognitive or psychiatric complex traits required the integration of multiple levels of phenotype and genotype data. Currently, high resolution genomic data has become available for most human populations, primate species and even from extinct archaic hominins, such as Neandertals or Denisovans. This symposium will host presentations that will show how this data can be combined with the analytic pipelines commonly used in clinical genetic research, and how genomic signatures of natural selection can be found in psychiatric disorders and related phenotypes. The speakers will also discuss the relevance of these findings for the long term goals of the psychiatric research community, including the prioritization of genes for functional studies and the greater understanding of the nature of psychiatric disorders.