iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Adam Hunt

Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Does spreading mental health awareness online amplify self-diagnosis? In my first PhD pre-print, I empirically examine this question (n =3392) with some kick-ass collaborators and tools from cultural evolution A 🧵

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Professor Penny Spikins is an expert using the archaeology of human origins to detail how compassion, trust, and pro-social emotions came about, playing a crucial role in the "human story" 6 November, London. 9am-5.30pm.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I confess, sometimes I worry I’m just diagnosing every modern crisis as an "evolutionary mismatch." Then I look at the news, look at how we live, and realize... well, the shoe fits. Even if the foot has been deformed by industrial footwear! :)

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Applications: Life History Theory to the modern gig economy. When environmental predictability drops, organisms naturally shift to "fast" life strategies. Precarity changes the inner incentive structure of individuals, no doubt leading to downstream macro economic effects etc.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Context matters! Let us begin any investigation by asking what the environment is signalling to the organism. Low mood can be a strategic withdrawal response, anxiety pays attention to threats, and so on, and on.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Loneliness can sometimes seem less like an emotion and more like hunger - an aversive sense-feeling tracking a resource you can't survive long without. Even e.g. violent prison populations, selected for an anti-social orientation, seem to require basic social contact for well-being.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Professor Randolph Nesse has spent decades asking what anxiety, low mood and jealousy are for, and when they go wrong. His talk at our 8th International Symposium: "Why all psychiatry is not evolutionary psychiatry...yet!" 6 November, London.

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Reposted by Adam Hunt

Tanay Katiyar @adigitaltanay.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

All six talks from the Bridging Mental Health Network at Cambridge are now out on YouTube! ft. @timdalgleish.bsky.social @camillanord.bsky.social @kristensyme.bsky.social @mkbruun.bsky.social @realadamhunt.bsky.social @annaalexandrova.bsky.social and Sebastian Rodriguez youtube.com/playlist?lis...

youtube.com

Network Talks (2025 - 2026) - YouTube

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

In one sense all psychiatry is already evolutionary - vulnerability to mental disorder arose through the same processes as everything else about us. To me the question is whether we refocus a little, so as to make that reasoning explicit, or leave it implicit and unexamined.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

The centrality of evolution to the human question always seemed logical to me - we like sweet food, we like sex, we largely agree these are evolved. Why ever stop the evolutionary analysis there?

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

A satisfying feature of the field: it repeatedly turns "this makes no sense" into "this makes sense under conditions that no longer hold".

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Medicine has a proximate and an ultimate register. How does the fever work, and why do we have fevers. Most of psychiatry has been conducted almost entirely in the first. Evolutionary Psychiatry is betting there's a lot of value in exploring the second.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

A nice thing about an evolutionary frame is how much it explains that you weren't previously aware needed explaining. Why anxiety and not calm all the time? Why grief at all? Questions you didn't know were questions!

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Sleep problems in modern life are often framed as a discipline failure. They're just as often a mismatch failure — a system built for darkness and exhaustion, running on light and stimulants.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

The line between 'personality trait' and 'disorder' in most diagnostic manuals is drawn by degree, not kind. Selection rarely produces traits that are all downside - it produces trade -offs, and therefore 'traits' have a range.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

A decade of EPSIG: largest lineup yet for the 8th International Evolutionary Psychiatry Symposium - in person at the RCPsych, London, Fri 6 Nov 2026. Luminaries such as Nesse, Le Cunff, Hurst, Spikins, Keedwell, Hurst, Brüne all giving talks! Registration link in tweet below:

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

We did not evolve to be well. We evolved to leave descendants, and selection was perfectly willing to trade your comfort for their existence. Psychiatry is in some sense, the quintessential study of that trade.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Low mood is not always a fault to be corrected. Sometimes it is information — a signal that the current pursuit is not paying, delivered by a system with no gentler way to say so.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

There is a difference between a system that is broken and a system doing exactly what it was built to do under conditions it was never built for. Mistaking the second for the first might have cost patients a great deal.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

The reframe people find healing isn't "you're fine." It's "what you're feeling makes sense, given what this system was built to do." Sense-making is half of recovery. Evolution happens to be very good at supplying it.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Half of psychiatry is built on the idea of "normal" - and almost none of it specifies normal for what. Statistically normal? Normal for a hunter-gatherer band? Normal for a system that's overshooting because the threat it's calibrated for no longer exists? These are different sentences.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

We keep looking for the lesion. A century of looking for the lesion. The uncomfortable possibility is that for much of what we treat, there is often no lesion: there's a working system meeting a world it was never shaped for.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Mainstream psychiatry asks "how is this brain different from a healthy one." Evolutionary psychiatry asks "what is this brain doing, and what was it built to do." The first question has produced a century of correlations. The second is where the explanations live.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

TODAY: Samir Okasha's webinar on "methodological creationism" - a concept that reorganises a whole psychiatric debate. The uncomfortable point: you can do most of modern psychiatry without ever assuming humans evolved — and largely, we do. Worth sitting with. Webinar 25 June, 6pm BST. Link below:

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

10 years of EPSIG. To mark it, we've booked our biggest lineup yet for the 8th International Evolutionary Psychiatry Symposium — in person at the RCPsych, London, Fri 6 Nov 2026. Nesse, Brüne, Le Cunff, Hurst, Spikins, Keedwell. Registration link below:

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Every emotion you'd like to delete was load-bearing for someone who shared your genes. That's why you still have it. The off-switch existed at various points in our history. The lineages that pressed it aren't here to discuss the matter.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Most of psychiatry proceeds as if humans weren't the product of evolution at all. Samir Okasha has a name for this: "methodological creationism." Once you see it, you can't unsee how deep it runs. Join us 25 June, 6pm BST. Link below:

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

The brain is the most metabolically expensive organ we have. Evolution does not build and maintain expensive things that produce only malfunction. Whatever depression, anxiety, and the rest are, "pure error" is almost certainly not the answer. Expensive systems are "doing something."

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

We call it "mental illness." We could call it "a brain doing its best in an environment it wasn't designed for." The second framing isn't a kind lie - It's simply more accurate. And it gestures toward completely different interventions.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

New Webinar: Samir Okasha's "methodological creationism" begins by asking "how might Psychiatry look differently if we assumed human behaviour was not produced via evolution?" Coming up - 25th of June 6pm BST. Link Below:

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Telling someone with depression that their brain chemistry is imbalanced is often disempowering - healing is just a matter of taking a pill and hoping it works. Telling them their system is responding to something real, and we can work out what, gives them somewhere to go.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Status anxiety is rational in a species where status determined access to mates, resources, and allies for two million years. Social media didn't create the wound! But it did remove every natural ceiling on how many people you can measure yourself against.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Disgust evolved to keep us away from pathogens and toxins. Then it got recruited for moral and social judgement — contamination, purity, the "unclean" outsider. Perhaps a lot of human cruelty runs on an emotion that started as food safety. Worth knowing where your moral intuitions come from!

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

We pathologise the kid who won't sit still, the adult who can't focus, the teenager who sleeps wrong, the griever who grieves too long, the worker who burns out. At some point the sheer number of "disorders" should make you suspect often the problem is the yardstick, or the environment.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

What would psychiatry look like if we assumed humans weren't evolved? Samir Okasha's "methodological creationism" thought experiment is one of the most clarifying moves I've seen in this debate. Webinar coming up - 25th of June 6pm BST. Link Below:

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Depression as evolved response: withdraw, conserve, reassess, signal need for support. Depression as modern trap: the withdrawal removes you from the very social and physical inputs that would lift it. The response is adaptive. The feedback loop it creates in isolation is not.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

There's perhaps a reason every antidepressant trial has a huge placebo response. Belief, hope, ritual, the attention of a caring expert — these are evolved healing inputs. The studies have implicitly been demonstrating the power of the evolutionary-therapeutic relationship for decades.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Of course, some of psychiatry's "treatment-resistant" cases may just be cases where the treatment was aimed at the wrong level. You can't always pharmacologically fix a problem that lives in someone's job, marriage, or total absence of community.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

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...

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

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...

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

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...

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

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?

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

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.

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Adam Hunt @realadamhunt.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

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.

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