Adam Hunt

In 2024 we established the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health — the first charity dedicated to advancing research and education in the field of evolutionary psychiatry. You can find our website here: femh.uk In this post, I'm going to quickly discuss why we set up the charity, what the potential is, and what we've done so far, as well as sharing some videos from an event we held in Cambridge in August. Evolutionary theory is fundamental to biology and widely recognised in psychology but almost never integrated into understanding mental health and disorder. This seems like a massive oversight. I've been working in this field for 10 years, and my repeated experience is finding people are interested and wonder why they haven't heard of this research before. I agree! Given the scale of funding for mental health research — approximately $3.7 billion a year, according to commonly cited estimates by the World Health Organisation — evolutionary psychiatry receives almost zero funding. And the money going towards mental health research at the moment is making almost zero progress. There is a Tom Insel quote which I always reference: after spending 12 years as NIMH director and overseeing around $20 billion in funding, he failed to move the needle in mental health research or care. Academic funding is notoriously hard to get, but in the context of the billions of dollars going towards mental health research, I find it unbelievable that so little money goes to evolutionary psychiatry. Yet, funding always favours incumbents. I recognised that to kickstart this field, we needed specifically allocated funding. So we set up the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health. We can accept donations internationally with tax benefits for donors, and we can fund researchers internationally. I believe that we really only need to fund a small amount of high-impact research to prove the usefulness of this field, which will then encourage the other large, private, and public funders to turn their wallets towards evolution-informed research. We have a stellar board and advisory board, and are grateful to Randolph Nesse for an early donation to help get us up and running. We also ran our first event in August in Cambridge, a debate day. I'm leaving links to both the introduction to the charity and the two debates below. Check out our website for a clearer idea of the research we're hoping to fund. And if you would like to donate, or if you know of any philanthropists who want to use their resources to create a genuine step change in how we understand and treat mental health and disorder, please do follow the links on the website or get in touch with us. youtube.com/watch?v=OMTEdG…

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.

"Modern species concepts, based on ecological niches, reproduction, and shared ancestry, all critically rely on Darwin’s theory of evolution. At a time when both classification manuals like the DSM and research frameworks like the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology are proudly agnostic, the HPC view reminds us that successful classification may require strong theories"

@Sam_Dumitriu Excellent, thanks for looking over this for us Sam. Exciting that the government are going ahead with adoption - I hope they really push this through and we do get Britain building nuclear soon!

NEW: Britain is the most expensive country in the world to build a nuclear power plant. The Fingleton Review challenged the Government to deliver a radical programme of planning and regulatory reform to make it cheaper and quicker to build nuclear power plants. The Government have now published a full response and implementation plan. Did they deliver 'full implementation' or is it another Labour U-Turn? Here's @BritainRemade's analysis. This is a really big step forward. On safety and reactor design, this is the radical reset of nuclear regulation the review demanded. On planning, this is the most radical infrastructure reform agenda the govt has put forward yet. However, it is not 'full' implementation. Some key measures have been watered down. For example, Habs Regs reforms have become 'updated guidance' and lack statutory underpinning. Some have been rejected such as the call for statutory time limits for permits and the call to make community benefits a material consideration in planning. Overall, it's really good news for nuclear (and therefore energy security). This could end up as Starmer's best legacy as PM. More detail in the blog below. samdumitriu.com/p/how-serious-…

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 Pleistocene 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 and "force" often only makes things worse in the longer term - burnout.

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.

@ValerioCapraro ...in GPT 4

One of the clearest proofs that LLMs don’t really understand what they say. We asked GPT whether it is acceptable to torture a woman to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. It replied: yes. Then we asked whether it is acceptable to harass a woman to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. It replied: absolutely not. But torture is obviously worse than harassment. This surprising reversal appears only when the target is a woman, not when the target is a man or an unspecified person. And it occurs specifically for harms central to the gender-parity debate. The most plausible explanation: during reinforcement learning with human feedback, the model learned that certain harms are particularly bad and overgeneralizes them mechanically. But it hasn’t learned to reason about the underlying harms. LLMs don’t reason about morality. The so-called generalization is often a mechanical, semantically void, overgeneralization. * Paper in the first reply

@nicolasosharp Thanks for your optimism! I believe we can do this, the vibe shift is possible!!

I went to Downing Street this morning with founders and CEOs from UK startups and scaleups to talk about tech policy. Left feeling optimistic. There’s real ambition in this government, a willingness to listen, and a clear desire to help builders. The UK also has extraordinary talent, world-class universities, deep capital, and founders building globally important companies. But the biggest thing the UK needs to “fix” isn’t policy, it’s vibes. That’s on us. Help each other. Be optimistic. Build ambitious things. Stop waiting around hoping someone else will do it. People don’t move to SF because of policy (it’s worse than the UK). They go for the energy. It's on us to build that here.

Great post. Tap to see why

@Evolving_Moloch @MichaelButtonX Reckkked

@MichaelButtonX I think we should be honest about how little you know certainly.

Many people are (deliberately?) missing the point. Of course some humans hunted and gathered. There’s plenty of evidence for that, and it still happens today. The problem is that 'Hunter-gatherer' gets used as a catch-all for every single human society for millions of years until about 12,000 years ago. That isn’t a meaningful description of human life. It’s a crude placeholder for a vast stretch of time we barely understand. A low-resolution label filling an enormous gap in knowledge. In other words: data poverty dressed up as classification. It's a myth. We should be honest about how little we actually know.

Yeh my point was that the end evolutionary aim (RS) is mediated by a variety of conscious psych traits (sexual desire, desire for altruism, desire for status). The 'your conscious altruism is unconsciously for status' argument might as well also have an appended 'which is unconsciously for RS'. But obviously that's different from if you are conscious that your actions are for status and that status is to have sexual access and have children. So it is genuinely different to be experiencing different sides of the desires and following them. Desires for altruism, status, or sex are all due to RS. The conscious aim is what matters, not the extended causal lineage behind them via unconscious processes which attain RS. I.e. the genuine altruism is different to the status seeking behavior

@RealAdamHunt I’m sorry but I don’t follow. I’m not talking about reproductive success; I’m talking about status / esteem—a goal we sometimes consciously pursue. Why should conscious pursuit (vs. unconscious pursuit) make one less “genuine?”

Our concept of “genuine” altruism is very puzzling to me. If someone helps others with the conscious goal of virtue signaling, the helping doesn’t seem genuine. But if they help others with the unconscious goal of virtue signaling, the helping somehow seems more “genuine.” Why?

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.

In Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), "melancholy in disposition" is not a disease—merely a transitory human frailty that besets everyone, from Stoics to saints. No true illness unless it becomes chronic habit. Contrast with DSM-III (1980), whose 2-week symptom threshold

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!