I recently read The Knowledge Gene by Lynne Kelly—a book that’s being praised for its big-picture attempt to explain the evolutionary roots of human creativity, memory, art, and knowledge. And, while I can see why it’s attracting attention, I finished it feeling unsettled.
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There’s a lot this book gets right. Lynne Kelly writes with enthusiasm and deep respect for Indigenous knowledge systems. She pushes back against the rigid compartmentalization of Western education and highlights how oral cultures use art, music, movement, and landscape as memory technologies that have endured for tens of thousands of years. She makes a strong case for embodied, holistic learning—and she doesn’t just stop at theory. Her praxis includes lived experience, both her own and that of others. She references real people, including neurodivergent children, and allows their voices and interests to shape the narrative. That’s rare, and it’s worth applauding.
So yes—this book is written with good intentions. And yes—it reflects a growing awareness of the strengths and insights of neurodivergent people. But it also left me with the sharp sense that something was off. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized what I was seeing: selective neurodiversity. And this sort of pseudoneurodiversity is not aligned with the neurodiversity paradigm.
Kelly ceases to be neurodiversity-affirming when she codes how she frames NF1—Neurofibromatosis Type 1. In her telling, the NF1 gene is the “knowledge gene,” an ancient supergene that enabled humans to store and transmit complex knowledge through story, song, and spatial memory. But when that gene is damaged—i.e., when someone is born with the NF1 disorder—Kelly describes their brains as lacking the very capacities that make us human. She lists what people with NF1 are “missing”: musicality, rhythm, spatial reasoning, prosody, memory encoding, narrative flow. She mourns the “loss of creativity” in their minds. She calls it failure.
And in doing so, she draws a hard line: some minds are “creative,” and others are “broken.”
That framing might not have been intentional. It obviously doesn’t even feel harsh to so many reviewers. But it reveals a deep tension at the heart of the book: You cannot fully embrace neurodiversity while simultaneously holding one neurotype up as a “glitch in the human operating system.”
The neurodiversity paradigm, as defined by Dr. Nick Walker in her excellent book, Neuroqueer Heresies, is not a celebration of cleverness or creativity or savant gifts. It is a political and philosophical framework that asserts the equal legitimacy of all neurotypes—including those society devalues or fears. It’s not about which minds are useful to evolution. It’s about justice. It’s about recognizing that diversity in cognitive style is part of our species’ richness, not a problem to be solved or an accident to be explained away.
The Knowledge Gene engages with neurodivergence only when it fits a celebratory or useful narrative—autistic people with pattern memory, ADHD kids with high energy, nonverbal savants with encyclopedic recall. But when the differences are less easily romanticized, the language changes. And that’s where the book’s core contradiction lives: it wants to praise human variation, but only when that variation can be framed as genius.
What would a truly neurodiversity-affirming approach to NF1 look like?
It would start by centering the voices of people with NF1. It would ask not only what they struggle with, but how they see and know and move through the world. It would explore the unique experiences of those whose minds don’t align with dominant modes of expression—not as deviations, but as perspectives. It would recognize the ways that society disables people with NF1, through inaccessibility, stigma, and erasure. It would seek understanding, not explanation. And most importantly, it would refuse to define a person’s worth by their proximity to normative ideals of creativity or cognition.
The Knowledge Gene is a fascinating, ambitious book. It weaves together genetics, oral tradition, memory craft, and neuroscience in ways that are often insightful. But it stops short of the radical empathy that the neurodiversity paradigm requires. It points us toward a more inclusive understanding of how humans learn—but then turns away from the full reality of human variation when that variation feels inconvenient to the narrative.
And that, to me, is the missed opportunity. We don’t need more stories that divide minds into “working” and “failed.” We need frameworks that honor all our minds—and the many, many ways we remember, create, learn, and live.
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