A distressing trend is emerging, among a group I refer to as "Neo-Darwinists," who imply or state flat-out that people with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are genetically dysfunctional, less evolved than the rest of us, and thus have nothing to contribute to our culture whatsoever. Some have even called for ADHD adults to not have children, for fear that this "defect" will continue to spread. Others use the straw-man scare tactic of threatening that any discussion of ADHD which isn’t purely "it’s a genetic sickness" could lead to loss of funding for special education for ADHD children, or loss of profits to pharmaceutical manufacturers and practitioners who make their living working with ADHD children.
This trend is one which I believe is destructive to our children and dangerous to our society. Because many of these neo-Darwinists begin their work by either citing or condemning my work, I must respond on behalf of our children.
In the Seventies, when I was Executive Director of a residential treatment facility for disturbed children, I developed a metaphor to explain ADHD to children, a metaphor which I subsequently published in 1991. The metaphor was that hyperactive kids were actually "good hunters," whereas the very steady, stable, classroom-capable kids were "good farmers." The hunters, I suggested, would do great in the forest or battlefield: their constant scanning ("distractibility") would ensure they wouldn’t miss anything; their ability to make instant decisions and to act on them ("impulsivity") would guarantee they’d be able to react to high-stress and response-demanding situations; and their love of stimulation ("need for high levels of stimulation") would cause them to enjoy the hunting world in the first place. (At its core, ADHD is diagnosed by evaluating the intensity and persistence of these three behaviors.) I told these kids, however, that they needed to learn the basic "farmer skills," because the world has been taken over by the farmers. Even our schools were organized by the farmers: schools let kids out in the summer so they can help bring in the crops. And factories and cubicles, of course, are just an Industrial/Technological Age extension of the skill-set useful in agriculture.
The evidence that ADHD may be genetic, and my own experiences over the years visiting with indigenous agricultural and hunter/gatherer people on five continents caused me to even think it possible that my metaphor might also prove to be "good science," although I have little certainty about whether it’s genetics, culture, or both which so often causes indigenous people to fail when put into European-style classrooms. (I suspect both.)
Since the publication of this metaphor, I’ve presented it to tens of thousands of people at conferences on ADHD, neurology, and psychology from Australia to Israel to England to virtually every major city in the United States. During these lectures I suggested that perhaps in ancient times there was some sort of a "natural selection" process involved, to borrow a phrase from Darwin. I suggested that in hunting societies, those very risk-averse, super-methodical, check-it-five-times-before-doing-it people would not be particularly successful as hunters, and so would die off and not pass along their "farmer" genes. On the other hand, in the careful, stable farming societies (such as Japan over the past 3000 years), those wild-and-crazy hunter-types would be weeded out, executed, or expelled and the culture would be left with a lot of very compliant followers and worker-bees but few inventors, innovators, leaders, or—well—hunters. I now realize that I should never, ever, have used a phrase invented by Darwin.
The banner of natural selection has now been picked up, and twisted sideways to justify the world-view of some in the ADHD field that people with ADHD are suffering from a genetic defect. This defect, they say, is the result of evolution—which occasionally produces "more fit" and "less fit" members of a species. (Normally the "less fit" die out or are dominated by the "more fit," according to this interpretation of Darwin’s work.) This is the natural course of the evolutionary process, they say, and the sometimes-explicit and sometimes-implied message is that those with ADHD are less evolved, and that humans who do not have ADHD are more highly evolved, Darwinianly-speaking.
The concept of variations in the quality of human evolution is the primary tenet of the doctrines of eugenics, a term coined in 1893 by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton derived the word from the Greek "eugenes," which means "to be well born," and promoted eugenics as "a civic religion based on science." He wrote that one day eugenics would replace Christianity, because of eugenics’ emphasis on selecting out only that which is "good, strong, and useful," while "selectively deleting" from society those genetic characteristics which tend to "weakness, physical or mental."
Eugenicists assert that nearly all human traits are inherited, including (to quote Charles Davenport, an American associate of Galton’s): "eye color, hair, skin, stature, weight, special ability in music, drawing, painting, literary composition, calculating, or memorizing, weakness of the mucous membranes, nomadism, general bodily energy, strength, mental ability, epilepsy, shiftlessness, insanity, pauperism, criminality, various forms of nervous disease, defects of speech, sight, hearing, cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, skeletal deformities, and other traits." Havelock Ellis wrote one of the classic early texts on eugenics in 1911, The Problem of Race Regeneration, in which he echoed what was then termed the Social Darwinist notion that genetic weaknesses or lower evolutionary status could cause people to fail in modern society. "These classes," Ellis wrote, "with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity, contain the people who complain they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them."
