Lori Hogenkamp – Center for Adaptive Stress
In many neurodiversity spaces today, the word science can make people uneasy. That discomfort is understandable. Science has been used historically to justify harmful classifications of human difference — measurement deployed to rank people, categories constructed to normalize some minds while pathologizing others. From eugenics to behaviorist control models, autistic and neurodivergent communities carry a long memory of scientific authority being used to speak about us rather than with us.
So it makes sense that some advocates want distance from the term.
But there’s an emerging paradox worth sitting with: in rejecting “science,” many neurodiversity thinkers are simultaneously doing some of the most deeply scientific work happening anywhere right now. They’re tracking patterns across systems. They’re mapping feedback loops between environments and nervous systems. They’re examining how culture, stress, biology, and perception interact in fundamentally dynamic ways — not static, not simple, not reducible to a single cause. That’s not anti-science. That is science.
The problem was never science itself. The problem was that for a long time, science was treated as though it only meant one particular style of inquiry: linear reductionism.
The Limits of a Very Useful Tool
For centuries, the dominant scientific move was to isolate variables — break a system apart, control everything possible, measure one thing at a time. This approach worked extraordinarily well for many questions. It gave us modern chemistry, physics, and medicine. But it also created a kind of optical illusion: that isolating parts was the only way to understand reality.
Human systems, however, don’t behave like simple machines. Brains interact with bodies. Bodies interact with environments. Environments carry the sediment of culture, trauma, power, and meaning. These are complex adaptive systems, not linear mechanisms, and trying to understand them through isolated variables tends to flatten the very dynamics we most need to see.
This is where neurodiversity advocates have been right to push back. But pushing back against reductionism doesn’t require abandoning science. It requires expanding it.
The Emergence of Emergence
Over the past several decades, this expansion has already been underway. Complexity science studies how patterns emerge from interactions between many components. Systems biology examines how networks of genes, cells, and metabolic processes interact dynamically rather than in neat causal chains. Ecology traces how organisms co-evolve with their environments through feedback loops that run in both directions. Network medicine reframes disease as disruption in interconnected biological systems rather than isolated single causes.
In all of these fields, researchers study emergence, nonlinear dynamics, adaptive systems, and relational architectures — not as poetic metaphors, but as rigorous scientific frameworks. And they align closely with how many neurodivergent thinkers already approach the world.
That parallel isn’t incidental. Many autistic and neurodivergent people naturally think in patterns across domains rather than in isolated variables. We tend to notice relationships before categories, gradients before boxes. We ask not “what is broken?” but “what system dynamics produced this outcome?” These ways of thinking have historically been misread inside institutions built around linear models. But within complexity science, they’re recognized as exactly the cognitive orientation needed to work with emergent phenomena.
Neurodiversity may not just be a subject of systems science. It may be a source of it.
Decolonizing Science Without Abandoning It
Much of the wariness in neurodiversity communities toward science is rooted in legitimate critique. Scientific institutions have historically been embedded in colonial power structures, and measurement was frequently deployed to justify hierarchy rather than illuminate diversity. Decolonizing science means confronting that history directly — questioning whose knowledge counts, whose experience gets to generate hypotheses, whose ways of knowing have been systematically excluded.
But decolonization doesn’t mean abandoning rigorous inquiry. It means broadening it. When indigenous ecological knowledge is integrated with modern environmental science, we’re not replacing science with something else — we’re expanding what science can see. When lived experience shapes research questions, we’re not rejecting empiricism; we’re making it more accurate. Science has always grown when new perspectives revealed patterns that previous frameworks couldn’t reach.
At its core, science is simply a disciplined way of asking questions about reality: observe patterns, test explanations, revise models when evidence changes. It’s not a static doctrine. It evolves as tools and perspectives evolve. For a long time, the visible part of the iceberg was linear measurement — that’s what early instruments could capture clearly. The tools are better now. We can study networks, nonlinear dynamics, and emergent systems in ways that were genuinely impossible just decades ago.
The scientific landscape is shifting. And many neurodiversity thinkers are already working at the frontier of that shift — often without realizing that’s what they’re doing.
Reclaiming the Whole Iceberg
The neurodiversity movement doesn’t need to abandon science. It may actually be positioned to help transform it — by insisting that human minds cannot be reduced to deficit categories, by recognizing that cognition emerges from the dynamic interplay of nervous systems, bodies, and environments, by studying patterns rather than isolated traits.
The goal isn’t to discard science. It’s to reclaim it from the narrow definitions that once constrained it — and to remember that the systems we’re trying to understand were never linear in the first place. We’re only just beginning to develop the scientific language capable of describing them accurately.
That work is already underway. Much of it is happening in neurodiversity spaces, whether it goes by that name or not.
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