The Edison Gene

The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child came out in 2003 from Park Street Press in Vermont. Library records list 262 pages along with eighteen pages of front matter, while Publishers Weekly and Open Library records say 280 pages. The difference comes from the way the pages are counted. A paperback edition came out in 2005, and in 2015 Inner Traditions republished the book under the title ADHD and the Edison Gene: A Drug-Free Approach to Managing the Unique Qualities of Your Child.

I could not find a verified Turkish edition; I am writing it under its original title.

I wrote this review relying on the book's table of contents, the publisher's and libraries' descriptions, the Publishers Weekly review and sources that describe the hypothesis's place in the scientific literature. I do not know the inside of the chapters page by page, so I will describe what the titles promise and as much as I could verify.

Who the author is

Thom Hartmann was born in 1951. His life story does not resemble that of a classic ADHD expert: he studied electrical engineering, founded companies for a time, then served as director of a child care organization called Salem Children's Village in New Hampshire. With his wife Louise he founded the Hunter School in Rumney for children with ADHD. It is reported that he developed the hypothesis after his son was diagnosed with ADHD.

2003, the year the book came out, is also the year his nationally broadcast radio program began. So the person in front of us is not a researcher or clinical expert coming from the laboratory. He is a parent, an educator and a radio host. I do not say this as a bad thing, but it has to be kept in mind when weighing the book's scientific claims.

The starting idea: the hunter and the farmer

Hartmann's idea is usually called the "hunter-farmer hypothesis," and it first appears in his early 1990s book ADD: A Different Perception. The thesis is this: the human species lived as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. For a hunter, quick reactions, constantly scanning the surroundings, plunging into the new and sharp focus in danger are useful. After the shift to agriculture, patience, routine and sitting still were rewarded. According to this thesis, the child with ADHD is a hunter who has landed in the wrong age.

The publisher's description says that The Edison Gene adds two things to this framework: a narrative linking a gene associated with ADHD to a global catastrophe some forty thousand years ago, and examples from modern innovators. The Edison in the title points to this second part. It is not possible today to diagnose Edison retrospectively. I described the problem with such lists separately in the piece why most ADHD books don't work.

To give him his due, Hartmann is not assertive about the solidity of his own hypothesis either. In well-known accounts of the hypothesis, he is quoted as saying that it is not hard science and was never meant to be. I use this sentence as a yardstick while reading the rest of the book.

Part one: The Past

The book is divided into three parts. Part one is the past. Its chapters, in order, are "The World of the Edison-Gene Child," "The Dawn of Civilization" and "Three Ways Humans Were Killed Off by Weather." That is, the world of the Edison-gene child, the dawn of civilization and three ways the weather wiped out humans.

These chapters try to show what kind of world the child comes from before sitting down in today's classroom. The third title hints at where the catastrophe narrative in the description connects: climate shocks, the survivors and the traits that made survival easier. The description on Open Library places the catastrophe about forty thousand years ago.

Part two: The Present

This is the body of the book. There are thirteen chapters, which can be gathered into three groups.

The first group is diagnosis and genetics. "Anatomy of a Diagnosis," "The Mystery of Novelty-Seeking Behavior," "Genes Move Around and Turn On and Off," "Other Genes and Influences," "Scientists Find the 'Adaptive' Edison Gene" and "The ADHD Gene and the Dawn of Human Civilization." That is, the anatomy of a diagnosis, the mystery of novelty seeking, genes moving around and switching on and off, other genes and influences, scientists finding the "adaptive" Edison gene, and the ADHD gene and the dawn of civilization. Publishers Weekly also writes that the book devotes too many of its pages to complex genetics and evolutionary theory, and that this leaves the practical part in the shadow. Looking at the titles, the source of the complaint may be this six-chapter block.

The second group is the brain and the child's life: "Brain Development and the Edison-Gene Child," "The Edison Gene, Drugs, Exercise, and Nutrition," "Providing Discipline and Structure for the Edison-Gene Child," "Alfred Adler's Principles for Raising Children" and "Educating the Edison-Gene Child." Brain development, medication-exercise-nutrition, discipline and structure, Adler's principles for raising children, and education. One library review counts the Adler chapter among the book's notable places. According to Publishers Weekly, Hartmann's parenting guidance rests on Adler and puts mutual respect at the forefront. To me this is the most defensible part of the book, because mutual respect, clear limits and consistency are also the common ground of parent training programs.

The third group consists of two chapters: "Edison-Gene Girls and Women" and "Spirituality and the Edison-Gene Child." Another version of the girls and women chapter was published earlier, in 2002, in the anthology Understanding Women with AD/HD from Advantage Books. For ADHD in women, you can look at the piece on hormones and the menstrual cycle on the site. I could not see the content of the spirituality chapter, so I am not commenting on it.

Part three: The Future

The last part has three chapters: "How Edison-Gene Children May Change the World," "Is Human Evolution Finally Over?" and "One Generation to Save the World." How Edison-gene children may change the world, whether human evolution is finally over, and one generation to save the world. Publishers Weekly sums up this line as follows: Hartmann argues that the out-of-the-box thinking associated with ADHD can help solve serious world problems. The book closes with an afterword titled "Yesterday's Child" written by Janie Bowman. I could not verify the afterword's author or its content.

Its strongest sides

The best thing about the book is that it changes the tone of looking at a child with ADHD. To the parents of children raised for years with words like "lazy," "naughty" and "undisciplined," it gives the message that nothing is broken in your child. Its value for easing shame is great.

The second is the discipline and Adler chapter. A parenting line based on mutual respect, one that sees the child as a partner and not an enemy, does not clash with evidence-based approaches. The third is that the book sees children with ADHD as a group misread in the classroom: ADHD symptoms in children are often labeled as behavior problems, and this observation is correct.

Its weak sides and the problem of evidence

First, the hypothesis. The hunter-farmer idea is an interesting story, not a tested theory. The study often cited as support is the study of Ariaal herders in Kenya published by Eisenberg and colleagues in BMC Evolutionary Biology in 2008. What was measured there is not ADHD but body mass index and height. And the finding is this: the 7R variant of the DRD4 gene was positively associated with body mass index in nomadic men and negatively in settled men. The allele frequency did not differ between the two groups. So the study suggests that the variant may be an advantage in some environments, but it does not show that nomads with ADHD do better.

The timeline is also problematic. Estimates of the age of DRD4 7R hover around forty thousand years. The study by Wang and colleagues published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2004 says the variant may date back about forty to fifty thousand years, to before the Upper Paleolithic. I could not verify which source the book's catastrophe narrative leans on. But Naka and Nishida's 2011 study found no evidence that 7R underwent strong positive selection in the recent past. The genomic analysis by Esteller-Cucala and colleagues, published in Scientific Reports in 2020, also showed that the frequency of variants associated with ADHD has declined since the Paleolithic. The authors find this compatible with the mismatch theory, but with a much older time frame and with negative selection. So the genetic data do not show ADHD as an acquisition that gave the hunter an advantage.

The idea of "a single Edison gene" has also become outdated. The genome-wide study published by Demontis and colleagues in Nature Genetics in 2019, covering about twenty thousand people with ADHD and thirty-five thousand controls, identified twelve loci, and none of them is decisive on its own. I described this in the piece is ADHD hereditary and in the polygenic entry in the glossary. A framework that expects a single gene for ADHD is under strain today.

The third problem is medication. According to Publishers Weekly, Hartmann opposes medication treatment and proposes instead education reform, alternative schools or homeschooling. Even the subtitle of the 2015 edition says "drug-free." Yet the World Federation of ADHD's 2021 consensus statement counts medications among the treatments with the most solid evidence and says that untreated ADHD is associated with measurable negative outcomes in education, work and health. The medication decision is made with a physician in every case. But presenting the subject as if it were a choice between "drug-free" and "skills," or between "medication" and "therapy," is to me a false dichotomy; I explained why in the piece medication or therapy. The book steers the reader too much on this matter.

Finally, the hypothesis overshadows the side of ADHD that has to do with loss of function. A diagnosis requires the symptoms to disrupt life. The word "gift" cannot take the place of the support a child struggling at school needs. I voiced the same concern in the piece on the question of strengths.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

A parent whose child has just been diagnosed, and who has felt both shame and anger, may find relief in the tone of this book. For someone who questions the school system and thinks their child needs a structured but respectful education, the Adler and education chapters can also be useful.

Using the book as a treatment plan, however, would be a mistake. A parent whose child has been diagnosed, who is waiting on a medication decision or who has doubts about medication should not make this book's anti-medication line their only source of information. Talking to a physician, putting into writing what the child goes through at school and looking at parent training programs is a sounder path.

For the reader curious about the scientific debate, the book can also count as a starting point, but it has to be read not as the hypothesis itself but as a popular interpretation.

Its place on the shelf

The ADHD Advantage, on the same shelf, also frames ADHD as a strength and shares a similar lack of caution on medication. Reading the two side by side helps to see the pattern of this genre. At the opposite end, ADHD Does Not Exist is a book that rejects the diagnosis entirely. Hartmann stands between the two: he accepts the diagnosis, but he does not count it as a disorder.

On the parenting side, Superparenting for ADD offers another view, and I reviewed it on the site as well. For girls, Understanding Girls with ADHD is the more accurate address, because Hartmann's chapter on women was adapted from an anthology and is not the center of the book.

My stance

I find The Edison Gene valuable as a historical document: a book that said the child with ADHD is not guilty but different, and that spread this to a wide audience years ago. But I do not think it is right to read it as a scientific thesis, and I do not agree with its medication advice either. Take the side of it that reduces shame, and set aside its claim to evidence and its "drug-free" line.