I wish everyone would get this!

There are only papers which suggest this could be true, none that conclusively prove it. That I’m aware of.

There are some cool studies done where people with a without ADHD are tasked to forage berries. The people with ADHD do better and adhere to foraging patterns which existing theories suggest would be more optimal.

A lot of the studies like that indicate the individual with the condition might benefit more from ADHD than the group they’re in, but I’m not sure that studies have explored group benefits very much.

There’s an often cited paper in which nomadic men who carry a certain ADHD-related allele (DRD4-7R, a dopamine reception variant with ADHD traits and novelty seeking) tend to have better nutritional status. I can’t recall much about it or how high quality it is.

A psychiatrist told me that people with ADHD perform better under extreme pressure and chaos. No idea if that's true. Personally I don't even think of ADHD as a deficiency. It's just a trait that is not compatible with modern society and workplace.

I don't know about papers but I had a doctor tell me they are overrepresented among snipers in the military. ADD could be an advantage to hunting.

ChatGPT's take was that 10 ADHD people/animals would go exploring and if one produced a new source of food then it would be advantageous for the group, but the other 9 could fail and be completely useless. A bit like venture capital funds haha.

So there is still room for complete failure in life, and maybe its a lot of luck/environment that some ADHD people succeed naturally.

Am biologist and keeping genes that are "advantageous" is the most common trap that people fall into about evolution. Evolution isint actually about keep advantageous traits the real idea is about differences in reproductive success, not about evolution systematically preserving only traits that are beneficial to the individual.

In fact Darwin's theory of evolution is kind of outdated as well. We now understand genetic drift and things like the neutral theory of molecular evolution from moto kimura and the nearly neutral theory of evolution from tomoko ohta may give some sort of explanation to polygenic nature of adhd.

Sometimes the upside is just being different. I heard about a group of cattle, and one of them was ill, while the others feasted. The feed was tainted, and so only the sick one survived.

Though, with ADHD, I think it's definitely more than that. It doesn't just make it hard to focus, it makes it hard to focus on what you need to, until the moment that it is obviously now or never. Focus, though - there's tons of that, flitting about, and sometimes grabbing you up and running away with you - sometimes for months. I would imagine that there are a lot of novel discoveries attributable to it.

> As a layman, the only condition I'm aware of with this "downside but also upside" quality is sickle cell anaemia

Essentially all traits that you might think of as "traits" and not "features of the species" have downsides and also upsides. Where there's any significant imbalance, the genes for that trait will be purged from the gene pool (if the trait is basically all negatives) or sweep to become universal (if all positives).

By seeking out novelty, someone could be a more effective forager or better able to spot predators/prey hiding. ADHD often comes with a high attention to detail, so there's lots of advantages that could come with that (e.g. that twig wasn't broken before, something has passed through here).

Also, having different sleeping patterns can mean that the people with ADHD are likely better equipped to keep a fire burning overnight and possibly be alert for predators.