Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see Atavism Isn’t the Answer.
Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there is no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, of action — because that’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.
In the last lecture I talked about values. I got a couple of complaints for that — it felt a little too organisational, I think. And that might be true. I am interested in the subject of values at work because of organisations like the army, and it did come out of a conversation about organisational values with one of my old management consulting colleagues. But values aren’t just organisational. You can only have organisational values because you aggregate values across individuals. And the values that we have as individuals shape us — how you raise your kids, what you think a good life looks like, what you put on your plate. It shapes everything.
And I actually have a really good example of this that falls out of my lecture on how nature versus nurture just isn’t that interesting. A little more topical, maybe.
I want to talk about atavism. And since I’ve mentioned the relationship between my work and the Army, I should say that this is my own perspective, not the perspective of the military academy at Sandhurst. It’s just Dorian doing his little podcast.
So. There’s a bunch of stuff around at the moment telling people that the answer to modern problems is to go back to some ancient time. Back to raw milk, back to ancestral diets like the Paleo diet, back to traditional roles, phone-free childhoods. A lot of this sounds pretty reasonable — and in fact so reasonable, I suppose, to some people that it’s now federal policy in the United States. The problem is, I think all of this stuff is built on two assumptions that don’t really hold up.
Let’s get into it.
The Template
The most interesting face of this right now is probably the MAHA situation in the US — Make America Healthy Again. Robert F. Kennedy Jr is the institutional face of this particular thread, and it’s interesting that he has Calley Means, a wellness entrepreneur, as his senior advisor. What we’ve seen coming out of this movement is pushes for things like raw milk and against things like seed oils. Anti-sunscreen messaging, food dye bans. Supplements are never far from this sort of thing either. Something like 75 bills across 37 states last year alone.
If you’re like me — a bit paranoid with a low sense of institutional trust — this doesn’t come as much of a surprise, because you’re already seeing this kind of thing in your socials. Microplastic fears, additive fears, hormonal disruption from wearing the wrong kinds of pants. But if you’re not immersed in that world, the fact that it’s now institutional should tell you this kind of thinking has become pretty mainstream. Pay attention and you’ll start to see it in lower-level conversations happening around you.
The reason it’s mainstream is because it bundles together a whole cluster of things people are already doing. All of them share this basic shape: modern life is making you sick, and the answer is to go back to how things were.
Seed oils: one in five Americans is now actively avoiding canola oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil. The claim is that our ancestors never ate industrially processed oils, so these must be what’s causing modern inflammation, heart disease, obesity. You’ll hear people in restaurants asking if the kitchen uses seed oils. It’s an identity at this point.
Raw milk: unpasteurised, straight from the cow. Multiple US states passing bills to legalise sales. The claim being humans drank raw milk for thousands of years before pasteurisation, so pasteurisation — ostensibly designed to kill off bad bacteria — actually just destroys the good stuff.
And then there’s The Anxious Generation. Jonathan Haidt’s book sold over two million copies, spent a year on the bestseller list. It hits on something that feels very truthy: the claim is that smartphones have rewired children’s brains, that kids evolved for a play-based childhood and we’ve replaced it with screens. Off the back of this book, 35 US states have already passed phone restriction legislation.
Now I want to slow down here, because there’s a pattern underneath all of these examples that’s worth making explicit. And I think the tradwife movement is probably the best way to illustrate it.
Tradwife was added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2025 — women performing homemaker roles, huge on social media. The example that springs to mind is Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm fame: nine million Instagram followers watching her bake bread, raising kids on a ranch, looking immaculate. The claim, whether explicit or implied, is that traditional gender roles reflect something biological. And modern feminism is making women unhappy.
This is where you can see the machinery. Because whatever tradition is being invoked here isn’t precisely ancestral. It’s harkening to a specific time period: roughly 1945 to 1965 American suburbia. If you go back to Pleistocene women, you see a very different kind of traditional wifehood — heavy agricultural labour, hunting, gathering, tool-making, trade. The tradwife aesthetic as it’s portrayed on social media now is cosplaying a very specific, very recent historical moment, and we call it nature. Research from King’s College London basically summarises the point: it reflects exhaustion with today’s work-life pressures, not nostalgia for a bygone era. And Ballerina Farm, this “self-sufficient homestead,” employs something like 30 warehouse workers and 10 office staff. The farm clothes are costumes.
So what’s happening here? It’s a template, and once you see it you’ll recognise it in every one of these trends — from the food trends to the microplastic trends to the traditional wife and traditional masculine role trends. I’ve written about this in the context of what makes theories interesting. It builds on Murray Davis’s work, who noticed that the most successful ideas follow a specific shape: they’re hot takes on stuff you don’t care that much about. They subvert weakly held beliefs. You can’t violate somebody’s strongly held beliefs and have them pay attention — they’re going to resist. And interesting ideas can’t be something you don’t care about, because then you just shrug it off. The sweet spot is beliefs you hold casually.
Evolutionary narratives are perfect for this, because they’re Just So Stories — after Kipling. Narratives that construct an evolutionary origin to explain why something is the way it is. They’re seductive because you can make anything feel true by making up some evolutionary story about it. Nobody can go back to the Pleistocene and prove it, right? Find the tradwife working at the kitchen sink in the archaeological record. That kind of evidence doesn’t exist. You can make up whatever evolutionary story you like to explain anything, without addressing any of the real reasons it might have come about.
And so you get this template. Every single time:
1. Identify a modern health problem — real or perceived, physical or mental.
2. Construct a narrative about ancestral conditions.
3. Claim the gap between ancestral and modern is the cause.
4. Sell the “return” as the cure.
Like any evolutionary story, it’s unfalsifiable by design. Any improvement gets credited to the ancestral practice. Any failure gets attributed to insufficient commitment. If you’ve listened to my podcast on mundane cults, this should sound familiar. It’s the same structural logic.
Some of the underlying concerns are eminently reasonable. Reducing ultra-processed food is almost certainly a good thing. Questioning sedentary lifestyles is absolutely imperative. Spending time outside is wonderful. That’s what makes this interesting — there’s something real underneath all of it. My problem isn’t that people want to be healthier. My problem is these two assumptions underneath the claims.
We Don’t Actually Know What’s Optimal
The first problem is pretty intuitive: we really don’t know what satisfies human needs. Every one of these trends follows the same template — find a modern health problem, construct a narrative about some idyllic ancestral time point, say the distance from here to there is why we’re sick. That assumes the previous state was better. But the evidence doesn’t support it.
Take seed oils. The science directly contradicts the narrative. Plant-based oil intake is associated with lower mortality. Butter intake is associated with higher mortality. The specific molecule people worry about — linoleic acid — doesn’t increase chronic disease risk and is in fact linked to lower inflammation, lower type 2 diabetes risk.
Raw milk. I’ve written before about how nobody really knows what’s good for you when it comes to nutrition, and raw milk is a good case in point. Before pasteurisation was widely adopted, milk caused something like 25 per cent of all foodborne illness outbreaks. In 2024 they were finding bird flu in raw milk — a disease that survives refrigeration for five or more weeks. 70 cases in the US by March 2025, where pasteurisation would completely inactivate the virus. There is an ancestral condition where you drank unpasteurised raw milk, but you’d have found a lot more people dying from completely avoidable diseases. That’s not quite as romantic as the picture that’s painted.
Jonathan Haidt’s smartphones argument is similar. Social media feels malicious — all these algorithms trying to steal our attention. I complain about it a lot on my website. But when you try to figure out exactly what the relationship is, you find it very difficult to identify anything. There are two ways scientists can talk about there being no evidence for something: there can be no evidence because we looked and didn’t find any, or no evidence because we haven’t yet looked. People slip between the two. In this case, we have looked hard for the evidence that social media causes negative mental health outcomes in teenagers, and we find it very difficult to tell a strong story. A meta-analysis by Ferguson found that the causal effect of social media on mental health was statistically no different from zero. And yet 35 states have passed legislation.
What I find particularly revealing is what happens when people try to actually live by these ancestral principles. The Carnivore diet is my favourite example. Paul Saladino wrote The Carnivore Code — the argument being that plants are poison. He quit his own diet: testosterone crashed, sleep problems, joint pain. He eats plants now. Or the Liver King, the Netflix sensation, who also denounced the carnivore diet in 2025. Or Andrew Huberman, who promotes ancestral protocols — cold plunges, morning sunlight, grounding, delayed caffeine — but admitted he’s been on testosterone replacement therapy since 45 while selling supplements.
All of these people promote the atavistic return to nature while relying on cutting-edge pharmaceuticals. The ancestral lifestyle cannot produce the results its advocates advertise.
The Robust-Fragile Paradox
The second problem is subtler. The atavism argument contains a paradox. On the one hand, humans have extraordinary flexibility — Siberia to the Sahara, we dominate almost any biosphere. Robust, adaptable, resilient. That’s the argument for why we should be out there using our bodies: we evolved these incredible capacities and now we’re wasting them behind desks.
But on the other hand, the same people tell you modern life is destroying us. Smartphones rewiring our brains. Seed oils inflaming our bodies. Office work atrophying our muscles. We’re fragile, brittle, prone to shattering.
You can’t have both. Either we’re robust, and we can handle modernity, or we’re fragile, and the ancient world would have been equally punishing.
Haidt’s smartphones claim is probably the clearest case. If the brain, shaped by millions of years of evolution, can be fundamentally broken by a decade and a half of smartphones, it must be the least robust organ imaginable.
Or the anti-sunscreen claims. If humans are so well adapted to sunlight that sunscreen is unnecessary, then why did ancestral humans in high-UV environments evolve dark skin pigmentation? Melanin is the body’s sunscreen. The evolution of melanin is itself evidence that unprotected sun exposure was a selective pressure.
Raw milk again. If we were robust enough to survive millennia of raw dairy, then pasteurisation should be a trivial modern convenience our bodies can handle. If our gut flora is so fragile that pasteurisation destroys something essential, then the ancestral world of contaminated milk and parasites would have been devastating.
The paradox tells you something: the reasoning isn’t about evidence. It’s about a feeling.
The Yearnings Are Real
I’m not saying the yearnings are wrong. Wanting to be healthier, wanting community, wanting less screen time — all completely reasonable and almost certainly associated with better health. The King’s College London tradwife research tells this story nicely: people are drawn to that aesthetic because they’re exhausted with today’s work-life pressures. It’s a rational response to late capitalism dressed up as evolutionary truth.
The problem is the reasoning. The Just So Story template — identify a problem, construct an ancestral narrative, sell the return — is completely unfalsifiable. Any improvement gets credited to doing it properly. Any failure gets attributed to not being ancestral enough. It’s the same structure as any number of belief systems I’ve talked about before.
And this kind of reasoning, if you don’t spend time thinking about it, ends up producing policy decisions that are really problematic. We’re heating milk to 40 or 60 degrees and somehow this is rocking our ancestral connection to the world. People are legislating off the back of that idea and it’s causing real problems.
Different environments pose different challenges and require different skill sets. The modern world is just a new kind of biosphere we’re adapting to, as we’ve adapted to many others. Rather than imagining some continuum from ancient wellbeing to modern suffering, it’s more like a landscape with many peaks and many valleys.
So we should listen to those yearnings for a better way of living. But just a little bit more carefully. I’ll leave some links in the show notes. The original article is called Atavism Isn’t the Answer. There’s also Evolution is Overrated for more on the Just So Story problem, and Hydraulic Despotism if you’re interested in the infrastructure side of modern dependency. Thanks for listening.
