Kaya Genc

Humans and dogs share a unique form of emotional resonance shaped by parallel facultative carnivory, cooperative evolution, and overlapping affective architecture. This perspective develops the Affective Carnivore Hypothesis, a naturalistic model proposing that human-animal empathy emerges from the interaction between trophic physiology, endocannabinoid modulation, and psychoplastogen-driven neuroplasticity. Carnivore-aligned diets stabilise glucose, reduce inflammation, increase BDNF, and strengthen prefrontal-amygdala regulation, supporting emotional clarity and accurate perception of nonverbal cues. Cannabis further enhances empathic salience, limbic resonance, and interoceptive awareness. Natural psychoplastogens expand relational capacity via dendritic spine growth, synaptogenesis, and enhanced limbic-prefrontal integration. This model is grounded in phenomenology, drawing on lived relational evidence from Buddha, Zen, and Bubba, whose companionship revealed how diet, affective modulation, and neuroplasticity manifest in real-world human-animal attachment. Volunteering at The DogFather Animal Rescue provided behavioural validation, illustrating how stable affective architecture supports calm handling, attunement, and prosocial caregiving. This work proposes that empathy between parallel carnivores is not merely sentimental, but biological: an emergent property of shared evolution, shared physiology, and shared affective mechanisms.

The Forward Evolution Thesis is a unified philosophical and biological synthesis of the Evolutionary Frameworks Project - an open‑science conceptual ecosystem consisting of fifteen registered frameworks archived through OSF and Zenodo under the CC‑BY‑NC‑ND 4.0 International licence. These frameworks establish intellectual priority, conceptual clarity, and open‑science traceability for a new developmental and biological model of human forward evolution. This perspective essay explains why modern digital environments push humans toward developmental regression - insecurity, volatility, superficiality, algorithmic conformity, aesthetic signalling, and ideological extremism - and how biological stability, cognitive coherence, emotional regulation, and environmental homeostasis form the mechanistic foundation for forward evolution. The thesis integrates multiple systems‑level models, including metabolic and redox stability, neuroketogenic clarity, endocrine integrity, cognitive ecology, circadian alignment, environmental homeostasis, and the Dual‑Engine Human Evolution framework. It demonstrates how higher‑order traits such as clarity, integrity, heart development, mind development, endurance, and truth emerge only when biology is stable and neuromodulator systems are coherent. This work is not a preprint or journal submission. It is a conceptual monograph published through Zenodo to accompany the scientific manuscripts of the Evolutionary Frameworks Project. It provides the interpretive, human‑facing layer of the project: a clear explanation of why forward evolution must be chosen deliberately in modern environments that reward regression by default.