AIM Framework glossary
Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis
Canonical definition
The mimetic architecture that evolved for collective hunting and predator avoidance, requiring rapid preconscious goal-copying and arousal propagation among group members facing external targets, persists unchanged in environments where external targets have diminished through apex predator status. As external targets diminished, the same computational systems increasingly processed internal targets, other humans, producing prey-substitution (Status rivals computed as prey to be displaced), predator-substitution (Status threats computed as predators, triggering survival-level urgency for non-survival situations), coordination-reversal (M-convergence producing competition rather than cooperation once it converges on scarce positional goods), and intensity amplification (internal rivalry intensifying beyond ancestral levels as computational bandwidth is freed).
Explanation
The target class the architecture evolved to process has largely disappeared while the processing capacity has not, so the capacity has been redirected onto the only targets available, which are other people. That is the mismatch, stated at the level of the computation. The alarm is therefore genuine. When a colleague's promotion registers as a threat, the threat-detection system is not making a mistake in its own terms; it processes threats through a single channel and cannot distinguish a rival's advancement from a predator's approach. The same fact accounts for the observation the Hypothesis was built to explain: disaster produces solidarity, because a flood restores, temporarily, the conditions the machinery was selected for. It also accounts for why appealing to civilisational threats does not reproduce that effect. Climate change and existential risk lack the computational properties that trigger re-targeting, so instead of unifying they are converted into further material for internal rivalry.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle (empirically grounded hypothesis).
Derivation
Chapter 10, Section 10.3.5. The failure of civilisational threats to trigger re-targeting is derived at Section 10.7.