This article was written to develop a question and comment I put to Terence Taylor in a session of Club EvMed, the online discussion for those of us working in the field of evolutionary medicine and psychiatry. Recordings of all Club EvMed sessions can be found here.
Societies are evolving. This is more obvious than ever, if you take a minute to look away from this beaming screen and ponder how you’d have consumed this article thirty years ago. We live in a technoglobal society now, progressed from wandering bands of twenty friendly hunter-gatherer souls to an earth-bound hive of…
Author’s Note: Every story of autism is different; nuances are lost in these sorts of short pop-sci articles. What follows will be relatable to some, offensive to others. Nevertheless, I believe the core ideas are important, and all-too unconsidered.
Spend a bit of time around the sorts of autistic individuals who run blogs or work in Fortune 500 companies, and you might eventually hear a comment, repeated in many forms, sometimes quietly, usually smiling, perhaps in a moment of exasperation, which sounds something like ‘autism is the next stage in human evolution’.
In the more troll-friendly corners of the internet…
All human beings have desires.
Desires are what get us up in the morning; the desire to eat, to socialise, to survive. The desire to love and be loved brings us our nearest and dearest. The desire to copulate and build lives together brings us our children. Our desires are the things we drive towards, strive for, wish for. And yet, the deepest, strongest of those desires have craved themselves into a strange situation; where they forever feel unfulfilled.
Human beings are born for a jungle. Or, more correctly, a savanna. African plains, grasslands, scattered clusters of trees, the occasional…
The theory of evolution by natural selection is strange: it is our origin story, and one of the most widely accepted theories in all of science, yet it is hugely underappreciated and under-applied.
Although essentially every professional working in the biological sciences accepts its principles, recognises its truthfulness, would refer to it to explain the myriad of complexity in which life abounds, talk of natural selection largely stops there, in both public life and medical education.
It is like the frame which holds up a piece of magnificent art on a gallery wall: necessary, of course, but not the object…
Adam Hunt
Researcher. Background in philosophy. Particularly interested in how evolutionary theory relates to psychology/psychiatry. Written a book on it, soon onto PhD.
