I just read an article about schizophrenia as a cliff-edge fitness function. It suggests that some traits, like creativity or linguistic ability, may confer an evolutionary advantage up to a certain point, but if expressed beyond that point, lead to schizophrenia (which reduces evolutionary fitness). Evidence points to schizophrenia as being caused by a complex set of genes, some of which currently show evidence for positive selection (the number of people who have them increasing) and some showing evidence for negative selection. That implies we're in a fine balance between the overall human risk of schizophrenia increasing or decreasing.
Tradeoffs at higher levels may also be important; for example, a tendency to attribute meaning to tiny gestures by others may be increasingly useful up to some peak—beyond which the trait crashes into sustained paranoia.
That sounds an awful lot like flirting. Where else would the ability to interpret tiny gestures have a more direct correlation with the number of children a person bears?
I used to call it "symbol-stalking": my own personal interpretation of what flirting looked like in an online community context.
But there was a period during Covid when isolation and loneliness got to me, and I took that way of interpreting the world into overdrive. Nobody was responding to it, except for possibly a few people, but my ability to determine who was responding and who was just going about their lives became unreliable. Or, well, even less reliable than an autistic's usual social bumbling. I started developing paranoia. But, with time, I came back from the edge.
Since then I've been trying to understand the way my worldview briefly changed, and then changed back again into something more rational. I think a lot of people went a little bit nuts during Covid. The explanation could stop there. But for personal reasons it interests me to find more detailed info that could relate, like this article.
Anyway that's what I'm pondering tonight.
You seem to be lost in your own thoughts.