Toward an Emergent Paradigm for Neurodiversity and Health
A framework paper proposing the Evolutionary Stress Framework: neurodevelopmental variation reframed as the emergent outcome of stress regulation and predictive processing calibrating across development. The review runs through the medical model, which locates difficulty in individual neurology, the social and neurodiversity models, which locate it in environmental barriers, and the biopsychosocial hybrids, and argues all remain largely descriptive: none explains why the same autistic person can thrive in one setting and struggle in another, or why burnout and clustered health conditions are so common in autistic adulthood. The framework's answer runs on three constructs. Emergent neurotypes: traits as coherent, context dependent stress and energy strategies rather than separable strengths and deficits, so the sensory precision that enables pattern detection and the sensory overwhelm in unpredictable environments are outputs of one regulatory architecture under different conditions, and cannot be prised apart. Stress incoherence: pathology reframed as mismatch, a long standing calibration meeting an environment that exceeds its regulatory capacity, rather than deviation from a normative baseline. And emergent allostasis: health as sustainable regulation, reached by designing environments and sharing regulatory labour rather than by suppressing traits. The target of intervention moves from the individual to the transaction, which is this corpus's substrate argument arriving from developmental science: fix the conditions, not the person, because the same trait reads differently in different habitats, exactly as an indicator species does. The bridges to psychological safety run through the equity strand: masking as high cost regulation, the least safe members bearing burdens the environment created, and a direct challenge to the individual resilience framing this corpus already critiques. Read it as what it is: a newly published integrative framework, ahead of print, with operationalisation outlined rather than done and no citation record yet. The weight here is provisional and should rise if the field takes it up. It earns its place now because the argument is unusually congruent with this map's own, arrived at from a different valley.
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