Happening Today, 28 May, 6pm BST: WPA Evolutionary Psychiatry webinar with Iain Campbell (Edinburgh): "An evolutionary perspective on metabolic and circadian dysregulation in bipolar disorder" Register: wpanet.org/section-page...

Why do metabolic and circadian systems break down together in bipolar disorder? Iain Campbell (Edinburgh) brings an evolutionary lens to this question — Thursday 28 May, 6pm BST. Free WPA EP webinar. Register: wpanet.org/section-page...

Reminder: free WPA Evolutionary Psychiatry webinar this Thursday 28 May, 6pm BST. Iain Campbell (Edinburgh) on "An evolutionary perspective on metabolic and circadian dysregulation in bipolar disorder" Register: wpanet.org/section-page...

Every culture in human history has had ritual, music, altered states, and communal meaning-making. Every one. We've largely stripped these from secular modernity and replaced them with..... Certainly less direct 'Ritual.' We then noticed an epidemic of meaninglessness. Chesterton's fence?

The patient who says "I've always been like this" is giving you crucial evolutionary information. Lifelong, stable, pervasive traits that predate any obvious environmental trigger are most likely not disorders in the conventional sense.

The hunter-gatherer workday was roughly 4-6 hours. The rest was rest, socialising, play, story. We built an economy that treats this as laziness and then prescribe medication for the exhaustion - the mismatch is perhaps not subtle.

Schizophrenia has persisted at roughly 1% prevalence across every human population ever studied. That's a Clue. Evolution doesn't maintain costly traits at stable frequencies for no reason. We don't know why yet, but "broken brain" is almost certainly the wrong answer in my view.

There is no such thing as a context-free symptom. Every psychiatric presentation is a response to something, shaped by something, persisting because of something. Evolutionary, non proximate causes of mental disease matter if we want to truly understand them.

The ancestral environment had less powerful algorithms optimising for your continued engagement. Engagement optimisation is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's new. Treat it as new.

Trauma responses make complete sense as evolved reactions to threat, loss, and social rupture. They become problems when the context that triggered them is gone but the system hasn't updated.

What motivates me in regards to Evolutionary Psychiatry is a certain disappointment with current Psychiatry. Psychiatry is the only medical specialty where the diagnostic manual has no clear validated biomarkers, the treatments are uncertain, and with effect sizes that would embarrass other fields.

Spicy Take: the DSM is often merely a cluster of symptoms named with a thesaurus. Describing a cluster of behaviours in Greek doesn't explain it. Naming is not understanding. We've confused the two for fifty years and called it progress.

"Chemical imbalance" was never really a theory. It was a metaphor that escaped its enclosure. Serotonin doesn't cause depression the way a broken leg causes pain. We know this. We kept saying it anyway because the alternative — genuine causal explanation — is hard.

The smoke alarm doesn't malfunction when it goes off during burnt toast. That's the feature. Anxiety that fires too easily in a safe environment is doing exactly what it evolved to do. The context makes the poison - the problem is fitting it to the context, not the alarm system itself.

Psychiatry has thousands of papers on the what of mental disorder. Remarkably few on the "why". Evolution is the only framework that makes "why does this exist at all" a tractable question!

Causal stories matter. Telling someone their anxiety is a calibrated defence system that's overheating - not a sign they're broken - changes what recovery looks like. In fact, one study I, along with others, am publishing indicates this has a measurable effects on outcomes.

The irony of calling ADHD a disorder in the modern environment, which we might describe as one specifically engineered to disfavour sustained attention.

We treat "normal" sadness as clinical depression, "normal" anxiety as disorder, "normal" variation as pathology. The question we never ask: normal for what? For ancestral environments, these responses often made perfect sense.

Modern psychiatry: here is a drug to make the bad feeling stop. Evolutionary psychiatry: what is the bad feeling for.

Despite the prevalence of Anxiety Disorders, Anxiety is not your enemy. It's a system calibrated for an environment that no longer exists. The question isn't how to turn it off. It's what it's trying to tell you - and whether that is appropiate for the situation at hand.

Final reminder: Evolutionary Psychiatry Webinar at 6pm tomorrow. Professor Alfonso Troisi will be presenting the GOAL model — a framework for clinical assessment built on evolutionary principles. 26th March, 6pm GMT. Register here: buff.ly/EbNO5po

Conscientiousness and agreeableness as "slow life history" strategy markers: underappreciated how much personality psychology and life history theory (r/K selection) are saying the same thing in different languages.

Upcoming WPA [World Psychiatric Association] Webinar: Professor Alfonso Troisi (University of Rome) presents the GOAL model — a framework for clinical assessment built on evolutionary principles. Webinar takes place on the, 26th March, 6pm GMT. Register below: buff.ly/EbNO5po

The World Psychiatric Association represents 250,000 psychiatrists across 120 countries. This year, its section for evolutionary psychiatry is hosting a free webinar series with international luminaries. All welcome. buff.ly/k4mrDOx

Autism most likely built the internet. One might suggest that ADHD explored the continents. We are quite literally using the products of "disordered" minds to debate whether those minds are defective.

Even in principled egalitarian societies, status hierarchies don't disappear completely. They became harder to see and therefore perhaps harder to satisfy, this may tend to increase rumination, not reduce it.

People perhaps underestimate how much meaning comes from being needed - from not being replaceable . Pre-industrial humans were needed constantly. Modern humans are optional to almost everyone.

Status hierarchies are inevitable in human groups. The question is not whether they exist, but whether they are legible, stable, and tied to prosocial competence. When hierarchies feel arbitrary, it is likely that dysfunction increases across the entire group.

I think to any observer, it seems fairly clear that we didn't evolve for 9-to-5 desk jobs, hyper-palatable processed food, and 24/7 digital social comparison. A lot of what we currently label as "mental illness" is actually a highly predictable mismatch between our brains and the modern environment.

Consider human emotions as part of a rational, self optimising system. Motivation emerges naturally when effort reliably produces legible, meaningful change in one’s environment. Where this link is broken, motivation collapses. No amount of exhortation can fully substitute.

The modern workplace selects heavily for sustained attention to abstract tasks in static environments. This is evolutionarily unusual. Human cognition evolved for movement, social interaction, novelty, and immediate feedback.

Feeling guilty over doom scrolling? Stress responses are regulatory systems designed to allocate effort in response to perceived demands and uncertainty, chronic activation often reflects structural conditions not necessarily pure personal responsibility.

Neurodiversity becomes more visible in highly standardised systems. The narrower the behavioural expectations, the more natural variation appears pathological. All may benefit if we consider alternatives!

Attention is not a fixed resource that some people “have” and others lack. It is a regulatory system that allocates effort based on expected reward and uncertainty. When outcomes are unclear or delayed, attention naturally destabilises. External structure often works better than pressure.

Many workplaces select for a narrow cognitive profile: sustained sedentary focus on abstract tasks. Human populations have historically evolved with broader specialisation.

Ancestrally, competence was publicly legible. There was strong coupling between environmental proficiency and social reputation - people needed competent hunters to survive! Today, it is often the case that forms of competence are opaque, delayed, or politically mediated.

For most of human history, effort → visible result → calibration. Now effort → abstraction → delayed, ambiguous feedback. Many “motivation problems” are likely actually calibration problems within modern environments .

Reframing ADHD. Economists have a concept known as 'Time Preference' - in short, that people prefer immediate rewards to anticipated future rewards. But to some degree all humans have a preference for 'now' over some distant future. Could ADHD be seen as an far range example of a normal human trait?

Preferences are individual - and should be celebrated as such - but not arbitrary. They track cues that historically predicted fertility, investment, protection, and social leverage.

Important: evolutionary mismatch is not a vague just-so story. It generates testable predictions about when traits should become impairing: rapid environmental change, decoupling of cues from outcomes, and loss of developmental calibration.

In hunter-gatherer groups, social interaction and feedback is continuous. Modern settings compress it into high-pressure intervals. The shift changes the dynamics. And allows baseless rumination when back alone!

Long 'to-do' lists could not exist in ancestral environments. The ability for foresight and planning was limited to the possible and fairly immediate.

A growing number of large-scale datasets now track how light, sleep timing and social rhythm influence mood. The strongest effects appear when multiple cues drift at once, supporting ecological rather than single-factor explanations.

Hunter–gatherer learning models suggest that people learn fastest when observing others in real contexts, not in abstract instruction. The apprenticeship model is more natural than rote learning!

A useful lens: anxiety often increases when feedback becomes opaque. Historically, social cues were immediate—facial expression, tone, presence. Today, performance signals are delayed, digital or ambiguous. Uncertainty itself drives stress.

"Humans are not well adapted to live in modern cities—and this may be having a big impact on our health and wellbeing. This is the claim of evolutionary scientists...who say “rapid industrialization” has reshaped human habits so dramatically that our biology may no longer be able to keep up."

"Neurodiversity becomes not just a moral imperative but a competitive advantage. For too long we have approached workplace inclusion as something we should do because it’s right. But, what our research reveals is that building truly inclusive, human-centred workplaces... it’s about good business."

Our minds evolved in small‑group, high‑mobility, high‑feedback societies. When modern life or work imposes long stretches of isolation or asynchronous tasks, this mismatch in environments is, all else being equal, likely to result in unnecessary suffering.

New empirical work (Nov 11 2025) shows mixed attitudes among autistic, ADHD and dyslexic learners toward the term “neurodiversity." Link:

"Although aspects of computer-meditated-communication may indeed represent such evolutionary mismatches...there is also..a failure to contextualize the negative mental health effects of CMC against broader societal factors which are plausible preexisting evolutionary mismatches themselves..."