When I review academic papers about neurodiversity, there’s one particular issue that seems to come up time and again. More often than not, papers about neurodiversity claim somewhere that neurodiversity is “natural.” It’s definitely not the biggest issue in our field, but this claim has become a bit of a pet peeve for me, for a couple of major reasons. Firstly, it is factually untrue. Neurodiversity and neurodivergence are not necessarily/always natural. Secondly, the claim is irrelevant, because whether neurodiversity is natural or not has little to do with anything important – like whether neurodivergence should be accepted and valued. Neurodiversity and neurodivergence don’t have to be natural.

I did write about this a bit in my 2022 paper on neurodiversity, but there it’s buried in so much other content that I thought it might be helpful to write a blog post focusing explicitly on this one little issue.

I should also add that not everyone who writes about neurodiversity links it to naturalness. I was glad to see, for example, that Sam Fellowes explicitly rejects the idea, and does so in the context of praising Robert Chapman for also avoiding calling neurodiversity “natural.” But unfortunately, I see the “natural” claim often enough that I feel like these cases may be more exceptions than the rule…

Factually, is it natural?

Let’s first get the simpler issue out of the way. Why do I say that neurodiversity and neurodivergence, factually speaking, are not always natural? To answer this, we would need to figure out exactly what we mean by “natural.” One meaning of “natural” would be something that occurs in nature, something that is not artificially created by human technology and culture and so forth. It’s quite straightforward to debunk the idea that neurodiversity and neurodivergence are natural in this sense, because there are many people whose neurodivergence is related to human-made stuff. For example, we know that prenatal alcohol exposures can cause neurodivergence, and alcoholic beverages are an example of human technology. As another example, we know that prenatal valproate exposure can cause neurodivergence (including autism). I could go on…

One could object that “natural” sometimes means “innate,” in the sense of being inherent to one’s person or present since birth.¹ Again, this distinction is not useful to us. Obviously, people often acquire neurodivergence later in life – for example, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injuries, and so forth.² We also know that autism itself can sometimes have a so-called “regressive” onset, wherein a very young child appears to be developing relatively typically until suddenly they stop learning new skills and may lose some skills they already have.³ This might have to do with things like immune responses or failures to properly prune unnecessary neural connections. Sometimes, the underlying factors causing “regression” may be present from birth, but they might only become active at a later point – but even in this case, the young child would still be shifting from having relatively typical neurocognition to being more neurodivergent.

Thus, factually speaking, it seems quite clear that neurodivergence isn’t always natural.

Prescriptively, should things be natural?

People always go around talking as though things that are “natural” are good. Certainly the people who call neurodiversity “natural” seem to mean, by this, that neurodiversity is a good thing, something that should be valued, accepted, and preserved.

However, this does not really make sense. It is an “appeal to nature,” which is actually an (informal) logical fallacy.⁴ Although we seem to have strong intuitions that “natural” things are good, whether something is “natural” is actually not at all the same as whether it is “good.”

In fact, if we think for a moment, we might realise that humans have a long history of committing various misdeeds justified based on ideas about what is “natural” and “unnatural.” For example, people have argued that being LGBTQ+ is “unnatural,” or that the “natural” place of women is one of inferiority to men. Some people still make these claims today.

Nor is this the only example of how appeals to nature can be problematic. Including in the autism field, one constantly sees advertising describing various kinds of herbal and naturopathic treatments as “natural,” being based on “natural” ingredients or on the body’s innate vital healing forces or whatever, but these appeals to “naturalness” by no means guarantee that the treatments will be effective. Indeed, I might point out that nature contains a variety of poisons that are lethal or at least very painful for humans, so making the “naturalness” of a substance our main criterion in deciding whether to consume it seems rather risky…

Vaccines also provide us with an excellent example of how “unnatural” things can be good. We know that exposing developing fetuses to rubella can cause miscarriage, and if the fetuses do end up surviving the rubella and being born, they can develop heart disease. It can also cause deafness and neurodivergence. Now, whatever we think about deafness and neurodivergence, surely we can agree that we don’t want to be causing preventable health issues like heart disease. Viruses like rubella are part of nature, but us clever humans invented unnatural things like vaccines to protect ourselves against them.⁵

Some people seem to link the beneficial “naturalness” of neurodiversity to evolution – if neurodivergent genes exist in the gene pool, they must be good, right? After all, surely they evolved because they provide some benefit? Well, this sort of argument can fail for numerous reasons, such as:

1. Sometimes, neurodivergence is due to mutations, not anything that was selected for by evolution.
2. Sometimes, genes that cause neurodivergence might provide evolutionary benefits in smaller doses or particular contexts – but if you add more and more of these genes, or combine them with a bad prenatal environment or something, those adaptive advantages might disappear.
3. Human society is obviously changing very rapidly, so various human genes that provided some evolutionary benefit in the past might no longer do so today.
4. Most importantly, evolution isn’t about benefits to us, as thinking, conscious beings who want to have good lives. All that evolution is doing is benefiting genes themselves, specifically by favouring genes that are going to reproduce themselves in the next generation. If a parent taking ridiculous risks or even killing themselves outright will – on average – increase how many children they have, evolution can select in favour of parental self-destruction. If having numerous children and abandoning them is a better strategy for passing on your genes than having a few kids and taking good care of them, evolution is totally cool with that. If having giant, absurdly inconvenient body parts like antlers or peacock tails increases your likelihood of reproduction, evolution can favour that as well. Evolution is totally fine with individuals having miserable or short lives, as long as the genes survive into the next generation.

Thus, the idea that neurodivergence “evolved naturally” also says nothing whatsoever about whether neurodivergence is good or bad.

I’ll grant you that praising the “natural” and condemning the “unnatural” can sometimes steer us the right way – for example, in helping us avoid unhealthy food additives – but given how often it misleads us, it seems like a horrible way to make decisions. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say…

Let’s be scientifically and logically respectable, please…

Admittedly, whether we call neurodivergence “natural” or not is hardly anywhere close to being the biggest issue affecting neurodivergent people. I might sound like a completely out of touch ivory tower academic when I harp on about this so pedantically, and perhaps I am that. But I think there’s at least a couple of somewhat serious issues with making these claims:

1. It promotes a sloppy form of thinking, which may increase the risk that we will make similar “appeals to nature” in other domains, like the oppression of LGBTQ+ people or the condemnation of evidence-based medicine.
2. It makes neurodiversity look silly, illogical, and unscientific.

In fact, I feel that the neurodiversity paradigm is just a nuanced, scientific, and highly sensible approach towards neurodivergence. It’s the pathology paradigm that is illogical and flies in the face of scientific evidence with its rigid insistence on viewing every disability-related barrier as a problem in the person (irrespective of environment). The fact that an autistic person might experience meaningful social connection and social flow with some peer groups more than others is very important to a neurodiversity approach, but pretty much irrelevant in a pathologising approach where the autistic person’s social deficits cause all their issues. The pathology paradigm is the unscientific approach that rigidly insists on calling everything “deficits” regardless of reality – for example, that ADHD is characterised solely by attention “deficits” even though we know ADHD people can often experience hyper-focus. I don’t think many people using the language of the pathology paradigm would deny the existence of ADHD hyper-focus or how social context and peer group can affect autistic people’s social success – as I’ve written before, I think many traditional researchers and clinicians are trying to “save the phenomena” by tweaking their practices and research and attempting to paper over these kinds of anomalies – but these tweaks are technically contradicted by the underlying tenets of the pathology paradigm.

Personally, I think the neurodiversity paradigm is highly nuanced and scientifically respectable, and that it’s only a matter of time before more people realise as much. Let’s not undermine that by adding unnecessary, unscientific, and illogical adjunct claims. I’m all in favour of experiential lived insights – not everything is about rigorous experimental designs and well-controlled trials, especially when those studies are asking the wrong questions – but logic and solid argumentative reasoning must be critical factors underpinning neurodiversity-based approaches.

1. However, if people do mean the term this way, it would be better to say “innate” because that is less ambiguous.
2. Admittedly, we might want to cure these acquired kinds of neurodivergence, but it is no simple thing to turn back the clock and turn a brain back into what it was before. Thus, even where cures would be OK in principle, we may in practice need to resort to applying insights from neurodiversity approaches.
3. People have come up with all kinds of nonsense theories about this, like that these apparent reversals in development are caused by vaccines. No, it is not caused by vaccines.
4. Sometimes it is called the “naturalistic fallacy,” but term can also mean something a little different – the fallacy that one can make prescriptive arguments about how things ought to be simply from descriptive premises about how things are. The similar names are very confusing!
5. In fact, one of the kinds of neurodivergence that can be caused by prenatal rubella exposure is autism. We’ve known that for more than half a century. So yes, I do find it somewhat tragically hilarious that the anti-vaxxers are trying to prevent autism by getting rid of rubella vaccines and thereby exposing more pregnant mothers and fetuses to rubella. I don’t mean to dismiss all the suffering caused by the disease itself or downstream consequences like heart disease, but it is rather farcical.