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Comment by numakerg | Hacker News Reader

>Put someone not on a spectrum in a society of people on the spectrum, & you'd be labelling the person not on the spectrum as having a mental disorder.

You could still argue that non-spectrum people are more "naturally" normal. Competition among societies has selected for groups where non-spectrum individuals are more numerous, possibly because this ratio leads to less conflict and more cooperation.

I wonder if groups are selected for a prevalence of 2 to 4 individuals per thousand [1] because these types of individuals have been responsible for technological progress in some way.

1. https://www.aane.org/prevalence/

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It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's hard to say whether a low prevalence was specifically selected for, or just not harmful enough to a population to select against.

Though in either case, I agree that society today is probably better for having some autistic people around.

There are a lot of problems with group selection as a hypothesis.

Human groups don't reproduce in pairs and undergo selection, but individual humans do. It's hard to find any examples of genetic material of a group being lost when that group was outcompeted by another group.

>Human groups don't reproduce in pairs and undergo selection, but individual humans do.

Under a sufficiently low population density, genes among splintered groups will diverge. Groups with genes that promote expansion and/or adaptation will eventually out-compete groups that don't. Does this process not occur?

>It's hard to find any examples of genetic material of a group being lost when that group was outcompeted by another group.

Isn't the extinction of other human species an example of this?

> Under a sufficiently low population density, genes among splintered groups will diverge.

Yes, and this occurs.

> Groups with genes that promote expansion and/or adaptation will eventually out-compete groups that don't.

For some definition of "eventually". Selection over genes competes to determine outcomes with "selection" over culture and with chance.

> Isn't the extinction of other human species an example of this?

Yes. And that's a disputed hypothesis.

Granting that hypothesis, how many such gene-selection events occur per ten thousand years? Not many.

How much of observed gene distribution is best explained by selection pressure from these rare events rather than by individual selection operating continuously? Very little if any.

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