Human Cognitive Diversity as Adaptive Radiation: Genomic and Neurodivergent Pathways to Species Dominance

Rapid radiations, in which bursts of diversification yield disproportionate contributions to extant biodiversity, underlie most of the known diversity of life (Wiens & Moen, 2025). This principle holds across clades of animals, plants, fungi, and protists. We argue that a parallel process manifests in humans: our global dominance as an apex mammalian species derives from rapid internal diversification of cognition, behavior, and social interaction styles. Drawing on evolutionary genomics, epigenetics, and neuroscience, we propose that neurodiversity—including autism and related neurodivergent profiles—constitutes an adaptive radiation within a single species, sustaining variation that enables resilience, innovation, and ecological mastery. We synthesize evolutionary biology with human neuroscience to suggest that the same mechanisms responsible for generating flowering plant and arthropod hyperdiversity also operate, at a psychological and genomic scale, in Homo sapiens.

Universal Reality – An Ouroboros

In the beginning, there was nothing. No matter, no energy, no space. Just an infinite expanse of possibility. And then, in a burst of creative potential, the universe emerged. The cosmic dance began, with particles and waves swirling together to form the first hints of structure. We don’t know how or why, really; lots of people claim this knowledge, but faith is still blind and science is more about probability than certainty, for all that humans regularly confuse the ‘effective certainty’ of an exponential probability and treat them the same. As the universe evolved, so did its complexity. Matter coalesced […]