A response to “Bringing basic biology back to INSAR,” The Transmitter, 28 May 2026
This week, May 28th, 2026, The Transmitter ran a Q&A with Christine Wu Nordahl, scientific chair of INSAR 2026 in Prague, headlined “Bringing basic biology back to INSAR.” It’s a generous interview. Nordahl is clearly trying. She talks about reaching out to geneticists who would “be sensitive and acknowledge the ethical challenges,” about introducing master classes to give attendees a foundation in biology, about learning from the neurodiversity movement, about wanting to bridge.
I want to take that effort seriously by saying what the article doesn’t quite say.
The slice called “basic”
Nordahl lists the seven topic areas at INSAR she counts as purely biological: molecular cell biology, genetics, biomedical interventions, brain structure and function. That isn’t all of biology. That’s a particular slice of biology — the slice with the strongest reductionist commitments and the weakest tools for treating variation as anything other than deviation from a norm.
Where in that list is systems biology? Where is dynamical systems? Where is allostasis, multiscale modeling, ecological developmental biology, network physiology, quantum biology? Where is the biology that has spent the last three decades absorbing complexity science and rebuilding itself on different foundations?
Not at INSAR, apparently. Or rather: not legible at INSAR as biology.
This is the move hiding in plain sight. “Bringing basic biology back” sounds neutral. In practice it means bringing back one branch of biology — the branch that produces deficit signatures, gene-discovery pipelines, and intervention targets — and treating that branch as if it were biology itself.
The conflict isn’t about manners
The article frames the tensions of the last several years as interpersonal. Students were uncomfortable. Geneticists felt targeted. Q&A turned combative. The fix, in Nordahl’s telling, is civility — invite people who will be sensitive, model nonconfrontational dialogue, handle the eugenics question beautifully when it comes up in the keynote.
Civility is good. I am for it. But civility doesn’t resolve framework problems. If the tools you bring to the table can only model autism as a deficit signature in a linear pipeline — gene → brain → behavior, with everything else called noise — then no amount of acknowledging ethical challenges changes what the tools are doing. The fight was never about manners. It was about whether the dominant framework can actually see what it claims to be studying.
You can’t fix a category error with a code of conduct.
The two-camp geography is the artifact
The deeper problem with the article — and it isn’t Nordahl’s problem alone, it’s how the field has been mapping itself — is the assumption that there is a basic-science axis and a lived-experience / neurodiversity axis, and that the work to be done is bridge-building between them.
There isn’t.
Laurent Mottron isn’t lived experience; he’s a perception scientist whose work on enhanced perceptual functioning is hard empirical biology. Elizabeth Torres isn’t advocacy; she’s a movement scientist running kinematic measurements at resolutions most clinical researchers don’t touch. Mona Delahooke is developmental psychophysiology. Esther Thelen was dynamical systems all the way down. Cicchetti and Rogosch built developmental psychopathology around multifinality and equifinality — concepts that come straight from complex systems theory.
These researchers don’t fit the two-camp map because the map is wrong. There is, in fact, a great deal of rigorous, mathematically serious biology that converges with what autistic researchers have been saying empirically for years. It just doesn’t show up in the seven topic areas INSAR counts as purely biological.
The thing that needs bridging isn’t basic science to lived experience. It’s reductionist biology to systems biology. That’s the conversation the field hasn’t quite managed to have — and probably can’t have, as long as only one slice of biology is allowed to call itself the whole.
Regulation and connection are the intervention
There is one more move the article makes without saying it. It treats lived experience, ethics, and respectful language as the soft side of the table — the part that needs to be balanced, with sensitivity, against the rigor of biology. As if relational work were a kind of courtesy, and the actual interventions live somewhere else.
This is empirically backward.
Co-regulation is biology. Biobehavioral synchrony, attachment-mediated cortisol coupling, vagal tone, heart rate variability, autonomic state matching — these are measurable, replicable, deeply studied phenomena. Tronick on mutual regulation. Feldman on biobehavioral synchrony. Beebe on dyadic interaction. Schore on right-brain attachment regulation. Delahooke on relational neurophysiology. None of this is civility. It is the developmental psychophysiology of how nervous systems regulate through other nervous systems. It is, in the strict and accurate sense, the intervention literature.
When autistic adults say that being met, accommodated, and connected with is what makes them well, they are not making a rights claim that needs to be balanced against the science. They are describing the empirical mechanism of regulatory health. The thing dismissed as “just rights” or “just respect” is, biologically quite often, the active ingredient.
A field that took its own data seriously would notice this. The conversations being labeled difficult — about ABA, about masking costs, about what counts as an outcome and what counts as harm — are difficult precisely because they ask the field to update its own evidence. They aren’t tone problems. They are framework problems with data behind them.
What this would look like done differently
A version of INSAR that actually brought biology back, in the full sense, would include sessions on:
- Allostatic regulation and stress physiology as adaptive information processing
- Dynamical systems approaches to developmental variation
- Multiscale and network analyses of neural architecture
- Ecological developmental biology and developmental plasticity
- Complexity-theoretic accounts of heterogeneity
It would treat autistic researchers working on these questions not as the lived-experience contingent to be balanced against the biologists, but as biologists. It would notice that the most interesting empirical work happening in the field is already crossing the lines the conference is drawn around.
The playground fight — neurodiversity over here, science over there, each defending some imaginary turf — only persists because the map keeps getting redrawn with the same two countries on it. There are more than two countries. Some of them have been doing the actual work for decades.
The conversations the field needs will be hard. They should be hard. We’re talking about how nervous systems regulate, how variation is structured, what counts as an outcome, and what counts as harm. These aren’t questions you settle politely over coffee.
But they are conversations we could be building together, if the map allowed for it. If biology were biology in the full sense. If regulation and connection were recognized as the empirical phenomena they are, instead of the soft balance to the hard work.
I appreciate what Nordahl is doing. The intention is real, the effort is real. The next move isn’t bridging two countries on a wrong map. It’s redrawing the map so the work that’s already happening[1] can finally be in the same conversation.
Maybe INSAR 2027 is the year.
[1]: For one attempt at this redrawing, see Hogenkamp, Sanghavi & Natri (2026), “Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health,” Autism in Adulthood. DOI: 10.1177/25739581261433443.
This is a perspective from the Center for Adaptive Stress (CAS), an independent nonprofit developing the Evolutionary Stress Framework — a complexity science meta-framework for neurodevelopmental variation, stress physiology, and health. ESF is a conceptual lens, not medical advice.
Leave a Reply