How ADHD helped in male evolution

People aren't thinking about how unnatural it is to train kids to sit down for 8 hours a day? Like forcing a work and school system to continue this way even though It is antagonistic to human nature

This fits for my ADHD brain.

I know Dr K means well but these “hunter-gatherer” theories are total nonsense and basically just ways to propagate sexism. Think about this seriously for a moment:

For something to “evolve” as an adaptation, it needs to be selected for. In an actual community, how is this selected for? Did women prefer male hunters which have split attention? Would a community which practices arranged marriages prefer men which are better hunters? What if the women and the community (unfortunately) get very little say? Then what? How would a male with ADHD be “selected for”? A male without ADHD could simply genetically out-compete them in any way they want (such as being stronger, less calorie demanding, etc). As you can see, it depends VASTLY on the community, but as far as I know there is no significant bias for ADHD from any particular ethnic group.

What’s the more likely evolutionary explanation, then?
1. It is not selected for, and therefore has no evolutionary advantage (but no significant disadvantage, either, in communities which are compassionate).
2. It actually is selected for, but not in any way as granular as this. Communities which had exceptionally low neurodiversity might have simply been very fragile and prone to falling victim to disasters all at once, and communities which had neurodiversity which was too high were dysfunctional. We see a similar effect in the origin of other diverse traits in other species (such as personality, selflessness vs selfishness, risk taking, etc).

If you think about it this way, then it makes perfect sense why plenty of women also have ADHD. There was no reason for it to be strictly men. A female gatherer has just as much use for split attention as a hunter. In many communities, women were also trappers, and in some they could also be hunters. There are these pervasive, inescapable facts that I think people often miss about early humans:
– They were still pretty much the same as us, in any way that a layman would care about. They had mostly the same brains; had the same tendency towards creative expression, compassion, and intelligence.
– If someone was too much of an active detriment, they can and would abandon them (but it would be far more likely to happen earlier rather than later: This is a part of why infant mortality was so high, as horrifying as that is.)
– But contrary to the above point, it was still common for *every member of the tribe to be utilised*. Think about this. Your literal next meal depends on the people you live with, in a way which is far more direct than the modern day. If you end up in the precarious situation where all your brothers are weak and your sisters are showing remarkable talent for hunting and trapping – Sexism is going to be the end of you. And realistically, after 3 days of starving, you won’t care who fed you. Likewise, it doesn’t matter how disabled someone is, the tribe will find any possible use for them that they can. If the tribe is prosperous enough that it doesn’t matter, then there will be less pressure for this, but generally, this will be in effect.
– And lastly, expanding on points 1 and 3: There is evidence of compassion overriding practicality, and annihilating natural selection. Anthropologists have found remains of individuals in tribal communities which have been missing limbs their entire lives, missing half their faces, debilitated enough that they would be limping everywhere, etc. In some cases, they have even found cases where these individuals had rotting teeth *because their tribe would spoil them with dates and honey*. These people were clearly very beloved and their friends and family tried to do everything in their power to support them, despite the difficulty of doing so in a time without modern medicine.

TL;DR: Don’t believe the faux evolutionary science “men were made for X and Y, women for A and B” crap. It’s almost always BS!

Okay, but what about someone who can be very dynamic and selective with its attention?

So this has been debunked but we make a short of it anyway? Or am I lost?

This may be true, but I also think a lot of diseases are incorrectly labeled as "more prevalent in men" simply because a lot of women are usually misdiagnosed. This claim also assumes that women didn't need to multitask as much as men, which is clearly false considering that women are the primary caretakers of children.

Dr K is inviting you to think about the hypothesis as a means to explore the function of ADHD in human natural history, not accept it as fact. It's just one example.

I dunno, but I'm also starting to feel that I'm more suited for a hunter lifestyle.
I can dish out an uncanny amount of output when I work long stretches like 48-72 hours, with a little bit of rest in between.
However that leads to at least 2-4 whole days of cooldown where I simply cannot do a thing.

A HOONTER MOOST HOONT

Something interesting is that because of our biases we often assumed that women were buried with the hunting tools of their husbands but recent research suggests it was their own. There is much we take for granted based off of our societal upbringing.

I guess I just became male brained 😂😂😂

i too love making contextual relevance from the past that does not help at all with how to navigate the current present

Dr K I usually love your content but this is too much.

ADHD is not a gender coded concept. Stuff like this is going to make it worse for women to get diagnosed. Apparently you can only make up pseudo biological explanations for men, not women?

ADHD is not necessarily more prevalent in men, as the years go on we see this perception changing in the data. White boys are the primary subject of most Autism and ADHD research, which has caused flawed diagnostic criteria and the under diagnosis of girls and women with ADHD. There a differences between male and female ADHD, but it is very up in the air how much of that is due to social conditioning and what can be attributed to sex and evolution. This view of men as hunters who evolved to have dynamic attention is not really based in fact and IMO this is fantastical speculation