The biocentric divergence: A neurobiological and evolutionary argument for the unlearning of cisheteropatriarchy

Contemporary struggles against patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and ecological extraction are, more often than not, narrated as a cultural awakening or moral progression.

Yet emerging research in social neuroscience, environmental epigenetics, and holobiont theory suggests a more complex transformation: these struggles are entangled with shifts in neural architecture, affective regulation, and multispecies co‑evolution that reconfigure what counts as adaptive life. Drawing on feminist and decolonial science studies, this article theorizes an emergent biocentric orientation, organized around symbiosis, interdependence, and planetary embeddedness, in tension with an extractive orientation that remains invested in cis-heteropatriarchy, dominance, and anthropocentric control. Rather than positing biological essentialism or literal speciation, I argue that these orientations can be understood as divergent, plastic assemblages of neural, hormonal, epigenetic, and sociopolitical patterns that differentially shape fitness in an era of climate catastrophe and systemic crisis.

Neural architectures of hierarchy and plasticity

Social neuroscience has begun to map how adherence to hierarchy, system‑justifying ideologies, and authoritarian worldviews correlates with specific structural and functional properties of the brain. A large preregistered voxel‑based morphometry study found that endorsement of conservative, system‑justifying ideologies is positively associated with amygdala gray matter volume, whereas more progressive orientations correlate with reduced amygdala volume, replicating and extending earlier work on political attitudes and brain structure. The amygdala is centrally implicated in processing threat, salience, and affective responses to social out‑groups, and convergent evidence suggests that greater amygdalar volume and activity support the learning, maintenance, and acceptance of hierarchical social systems and dominance relations. These findings resonate with political psychology research on social dominance orientation (SDO), which conceptualizes a preference for group‑based hierarchy and inequality as a stable attitudinal dimension that predicts support for patriarchal, racist, and heteronormative policies.

By contrast, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and in particular the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg), functions as an integrative hub for social cognition, error monitoring, and flexible updating in response to social feedback. Reviews of human and non‑human primate data indicate that the ACCg is specialized for processing other‑oriented information, encoding vicarious motivation, and tracking prediction errors about others’ intentions, which underpins capacities such as empathy, perspective‑taking, and context‑sensitive cooperation.
Variability in ACC structure and connectivity has been linked to individual differences in socio‑cognitive abilities and to disorders characterized by callousness and diminished concern for others. This suggests that political and ethical projects oriented toward unlearning hierarchy, such as queer, feminist, and decolonial movements are supported by, and may further cultivate, neural architectures that prioritize social monitoring, relational accountability, and the decentering of the self as the primary locus of value.

Crucially, these neural profiles are not fixed types but dynamic products of developmental histories, socialization, and ongoing experience. Gene-environment interaction work on SDO and related ideological constructs indicates that both heritable factors and shared cultural–political environments shape the propensity to endorse hierarchy‑enhancing beliefs. From a queer ecofeminist perspective, we can thus conceptualize reactionary and integrative orientations as historically situated neuro‑political assemblages rather than hardwired essences. This leaves open the possibility of neuroplastic unlearning of dominance and the cultivation of biocentric dispositions across the lifespan.

Holobionts, epigenetics, and biocentric fitness

Recent developments in microbiome research and evolutionary theory challenge the notion of the human as a bounded, autonomous individual, instead framing humans as holobionts, multi‑species collectives composed of host and symbiotic microbial communities whose genomes, metabolisms, and signaling systems co‑produce phenotype and adaptive capacity. Holobiont frameworks argue that host–microbiome interactions generate substantial phenotypic variation, modulate gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms, and can influence rapid evolutionary trajectories and transgenerational inheritance. Microorganisms have been shown to alter host gene expression via DNA methylation and other epigenetic pathways, thereby affecting development, immunity, and behavior in ways that are heritable across generations.

This reconceptualization of the human as a composite organism destabilizes patriarchal imaginaries of man over nature, revealing instead a condition of structural dependency on microbial, vegetal, animal, and abiotic relations for basic survival. Environmental epigenetics demonstrates that exposures such as pollution, dietary changes, and psychosocial stress can induce epigenetic modifications associated with chronic inflammation, metabolic disorders, and mental health conditions, some of which exhibit intergenerational persistence.
In contexts of racialized and gendered environmental violence, these findings show how systems of extraction and domination are inscribed not only in landscapes but also in bodies and genomes, and therefore function as what feminist scholars have called slow violence that accumulates over time.​

Within this holobiont paradigm, biocentric orientations, those that treat ecosystems as co‑constitutive rather than external resources, can be understood as adaptive strategies for maintaining the homeostasis of the wider life‑support assemblage on which human bodies depend.

When political–economic orders organize around aggressive extraction, they are basically operating analogously to virulent pathogens that damage or destabilize their host, eventually undermining their own conditions of existence.

Evolutionary work on cooperation emphasizes that major transitions in biological organization, from single cells to multicellular organisms and complex societies, depend on mechanisms that stabilize cooperation and suppress unmitigated competition. Interpreted through a feminist, decolonial lens, the current ecological crisis thus exposes extractivist, patriarchal infrastructures as biologically self‑terminating, while elevating symbiotic, care‑centered practices as central to long‑term holobiont fitness.

Rethinking selection: From competition to cooperation

Classic r/K‑selection theory distinguished organisms that maximize reproduction under high mortality (r‑strategists) from those that invest in fewer, higher‑quality offspring near carrying capacity (K‑strategists), but this framework has been heavily critiqued for oversimplifying life‑history variation and neglecting causal mechanisms. Contemporary evolutionary biology instead foregrounds multiple, interacting mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation, kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection, each with simple rules under which cooperative behavior can invade and stabilize within populations. These mechanisms demonstrate that, under many conditions, cooperative strategies can outcompete purely selfish or exploitative strategies, particularly in structured populations and repeated interactions where reputation, relational memory, and network topology matter.

Rather than mapping human political orientations onto a discredited r/K binary, it is more precise to conceptualize extractive and integrative trajectories as distinct bundles of behavioral, cognitive, and hormonal patterns that occupy different regions of the cooperative, competitive landscape. Social endocrinology research shows that hormones such as oxytocin and cortisol participate in feedback loops that shape social bonding, trust, and responses to conflict: oxytocin can facilitate empathy and attachment and dampen amygdala reactivity to social threat while reducing cortisol, but chronic stress and persistently elevated cortisol can blunt these effects and entrench defensive, vigilance‑oriented states.

In hierarchical, patriarchal contexts that normalize violence and precarity, endocrine systems may be continually driven toward high‑stress, dominance‑oriented profiles, whereas relational cultures of mutual care and equity are more likely to support hormonal patterns conducive to cooperation and repair.

From a queer ecofeminist standpoint, these data invite us to theorize sexual selection and social organization not as biologically fixed outcomes but as contested terrains where cultural norms, institutions, and ecological conditions co‑produce what appears natural. For example, patriarchal mating scripts that valorize dominance, rigid gender roles, and fertility signaling can be read as one local attractor within a broader space of possibilities, in which more egalitarian, fluid, and care‑centered sexual cultures represent alternative adaptive peaks. In this sense, movements that redistribute care labor, challenge binary gender, and cultivate multispecies kinship are not merely ideological projects; they are experiments in reorganizing the selection pressures that shape which relational styles and embodiments are sustainable.

Survival, speciation, and the ethics of symbiosis

Framing the present conjuncture as a divergence between an “Integrated (Symbiotic) Species” and a “Toxic (Extractive) Branch” is analytically provocative but biologically imprecise if construed as literal speciation, which requires reproductive isolation and genetic divergence that are not currently evident in humans. It is more accurate to speak of incipient biocultural lineages: clusters of practices, institutions, and embodied dispositions that differentially align with cooperative or exploitative evolutionary dynamics and that may, over long timescales, contribute to patterned genetic and epigenetic differentiation. Under conditions of accelerating climate change, resource instability, and cascading health crises, extractivist infrastructures are generating the very stressors, chronic psychosocial stress, polluted environments, disrupted microbiomes, that erode the resilience of those who remain tethered to dominance as a primary mode of relating.

Conversely, biocentric, integrative lineages can be understood as investing in the maintenance of the planetary commons, soil, water, air, microbial diversity, social trust, without which human and more‑than‑human life becomes untenable. Evolutionary work on major transitions emphasizes that new levels of organization emerge when entities relinquish some autonomy to participate in collective regulation and benefit from shared robustness. This resonates with Indigenous and feminist cosmologies that foreground reciprocity, relational accountability, and the personhood of land and non‑human beings, offering frameworks in which “adaptation” is not a competitive race but a deepening of mutual responsiveness across species and generations.​

Final thoughts...

The ethical stakes of this divergence are worth noting here. If adaptation in the Anthropocene hinges on the capacity to inhabit holobiont interdependence and to reconfigure neural, hormonal, and institutional architectures away from punitive hierarchy and toward symbiotic care, then refusing to unlearn patriarchy and ecological dominance becomes not only a political choice but a commitment to a mode of life with diminishing viability. Yet because neurobiological and epigenetic systems remain plastic, the future is not a simple winnowing of two fixed branches but an ongoing struggle over which lineages of relation we cultivate, protect, and pass on.