8 Ways Evolution Has Royally Screwed You Over
4. It Could Cause ADHD
Now that our lives generally consist of sitting in a variety of different chairs, traits that would have previously been useful to our ancestors can now be viewed as drawbacks in modern society. ADHD, which is so incompatible with modern life that our children rattle like pill bottles, could well be one of these.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, generally has a strong a genetic component and effects somewhere between 5-11% of American children, indicating that it might have provided an evolutionary edge to our ancestors.
Humans that evolved to be hyper-aware of their environment - ergo more alert to weather, predators and prey - are likely to thrive better in a hunter-gatherer environment. It helps to be distracted by every little noise if it means that you avoid becoming dinner. A study of hunter-gatherer tribes by Northwestern University found that those who exhibited ADHD-like qualities tended to be, on average, better nourished.
We tend to forget that sitting in a room and focussing on a single task for hours on end is not, evolutionarily speaking, "normal" at all. The fact that some people have to literally be on Ritalin to do it is pretty strong evidence of this.