Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate? | Hacker News Reader

Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?

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91 pointsdavesailer95 comments

How does this explain the comorbidities associated with autism?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_comorbid_to_autis...

It seems to somewhat focus on the more high functioning/savant cases than those who have to wear diapers through their entire life and suffer from severe metabolic and immune system issues.

Sickle cell anemia? 1 gene malaria, two copies a disease (I might have cause wrong).

But that doesn’t explain the multiple genetic and chromosomal disorders that are associated with autism.

It’s almost like autism is a side effect of disorders that are associated with cognitive impairment.

Personally I think it's more likely that we are grouping a bunch of distinct disorders under the "Autism" label right now, because psychiatric diagnosis is still quite crude. Origins, mechanisms, etc. could be widely different while still causing some overlap in symptom profile. Imagine if we had to distinguish between different infections using only fuzzy behavioral definitions for example.

Agreed. I have worked with autistic students in high school and lived with people with asperger's in college, and I am very unconvinced that there is a "spectrum". There is of course a research and funding incentive to cross-label marginally related disorders.

No kidding about the funding. I once asked a PI what they thought about the relation of both Schizophrenia and Autism to maternal immune activation models, like is there any way to distinguish what we are actually modeling. Their only answer was "depends who you are trying to get funding from".

I don't think that fully explains it though, even psychiatric diseases with less funding buzz word power suffer from a similar fate. Diagnosis is a hard problem, especially when all you can really go on is patient self report and a few hours of observed behavior. Although I do think that psychiatry as a field could be approaching the issue better too, a lot of people seem to get stuck in their old ways.

I agree, it seems to be that the spectrum at this point is pretty close to losing clinical significance, I know it’s been rained down a bit in the past few years.

When I was in highschool we had a mandatory “volunteering” program (yes I understand it’s an oxymoron) I volunteered at a day care for kids with learning disabilities.

To me it almost felt that those which do express savant like aptitude towards certain activities are quite similar to how blind people get relatively super human hearing.

To me it seemed that w/e training or reinforcement of our neurological networks happens is interrupted in some manner for most signals other than those which say makes you extremely good at music or maths.

It never felt like the next step in human evolution to me but always like they were caged and found a single avenue of escape.

Does the government collect detailed information from families of autistic individuals? (e.g. where they lived, food they ate, products they used, chemicals they were exposed to, etc)

I feel like if this were caused by something recently introduced to human life (within past 100 years), we should be able to at least narrow it down using big data and deep learning.

This article fills a gap in my vocabulary for someone who shares some traits associated with ASD but doesn't suffer from any negative effects, i.e. is not in the scope of the medical autistic spectrum. The word is systemizing or being systematic.

Autistic spectrum disorders then manifest in systemizing behaviour, but that doesn't mean only people with autism are systematic.

> This article fills a gap in my vocabulary for someone who shares some traits associated with ASD but doesn't suffer from any negative effects, i.e. is not in the scope of the medical autistic spectrum

Another phrase you could add to your vocabulary to describe that is "broad autism phenotype" (BAP). People with BAP have significantly more autistic traits than the average person does, but not to the extent that a diagnosis of ASD is warranted.

BAP is very common in two groups of people (i) close blood relatives of people with ASD (parents, unaffected siblings, etc); (ii) people in STEM professions. (Of course, those two groups are overlapping–ASD is more common in children of STEM professionals than in the general population)

The term "systematising" is specifically associated with Simon Baron-Cohen's theories of the nature and causes of ASD, which are controversial. By contrast, the term "BAP" is much more neutral, it doesn't presume any particular theory about what ASD is or where it comes from.

Thank you, that is an interesting insight.

Personally I don't find the Empathising–systemising theory convincing, it seems as a false dichotomy to me. On the other hand I just remembered that my father's use of the word systematic in the above sense predates this theory because that's how he happened to describe me when I was a child.

TIL. Is BAP comorbid with ADD too?

That's a very interesting question. BAP is a subclinical condition. I'm not sure whether you can, strictly speaking, have a subclinical condition in conjunction with a clinical condition–how do you know that the features of the subclinical condition aren't actually symptoms of the clinical condition? (And the word "comorbid" maybe doesn't quite fit–does a subclinical condition really fit under the definition of "morbid"?)

ADHD and ASD have a lot of overlap. A significant minority of individuals with ADHD (20-30%) have a substantial degree of autistic traits. Many of that 20-30% would have enough for a comorbid ASD diagnosis, but not all of them. If you zero in on the individuals with ADHD who have substantial autistic traits but not quite enough to justify the comorbid diagnosis of ASD – do you say those individuals have ADHD with BAP? Or do you say that they just have ADHD, and that the varied symptoms of ADHD can sometimes include autistic traits?

The term as used by Robert Trivers (evolutionary psychologist) is ‘Strong Systemiser’

Interesting. Mutations have their uses, but not all.

The increasing rates of Autism now are most likely the result of increasingly advanced maternal age for pregnancies.

Healthy BMI, cardiovascular fitness, and youth are some of the key factors to a healthy pregnancy.

Edit: I didn't mean to say that advanced maternal age is the "only" reason for autism. I was just quoting what I was taught to be one of the main factors for the increasing rates of autism. Some can argue it's increased testing, etc.

Source?

The OBGYN director taught me this during a lecture at my hospital (I'm a medical student). He's also a PhD. It was casual conversation, so I don't have the sources.

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/link-parental-age-autism-e...

That certainly doesn't explain an awful lot of cases. Two of the most fit women I knew had autistic kids in their early 20s. And "blame the mother" has a really bad history for autism.

Surely increased emphasis on actually diagnosing it has to be one of the bigger drivers.

I once read a theory that it was caused by different prenatal nutrition and lack of Vitamin D, which of course involves the mother but I wouldn't call blaming her since, as they say, it takes a village.

Not sure if people currently believe this or not.

> lack of vitamin D

Wouldn't that mean we would see more autistic kids further away from the equator and born from April to June?

Only if you assume everyone has the same diet, biology, and tendency to stay inside as each other and as previous generations, which isn't true.

There would definitely be an effect but you'd have to do things like blood tests, I don't think you can easily predict which people are deficient.

autism does correlate with birth month https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296777/?report... and does seem to be more prevalent in particular latitudes, though that may be an effect of social/industrial/economic conditions.

Thanks! That was the perfect paper.

Somali children in Sweden are 3-4x more likely to be Autistic than Swedish children:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23221308_Prevalence...

73% of pregnant Somali women in Sweden are Vitamin D deficient vs 5% of pregnant Swedish women:

https://www.alliedacademies.org/articles/vitamin-dbinding-pr...

> 73% of pregnant Somali women in Sweden are Vitamin D deficient vs 5% of pregnant Swedish women

You have to be careful with those claims; I believe "Vitamin D deficiency" is one of the medical metrics that isn't race-normed. But there's no reason to expect Somalis to have the same natural level of Vitamin D that Swedes do.

Given the terrible health consequences of deficiency, I think assuming racial difference in healthy vitamin D levels is a more dangerous claim that requires a burden of proof.

Melanin absorbs the UV light our bodies use to produce vitamin D.

It is an important public health issue for people with darker skin living in temperate or polar areas to get enough vitamin D.

Lack of vitamin D for people with darker skin is the inverse of paler people being at risk of burns in sunny areas.

I thought a complaint that Somalis in Minnesota had was that autism in their kids was disproportionately (not sure about exact meaning of this term) "low-functioning"

Low/high functioning isn't really a specific medical term, but basically it just means if you can live on your own or not.

If you're not only high functioning but gifted* then you're "twice exceptional".

* school term that supposedly means exceptionally intelligent, sometimes gets you to a different school/class for smart kids, but actually it's like special education for kids too fast/nerdy to be in regular classes without going nuts

Really interesting, ty. Agree with the sibling comments, needs normalization of course, but if that doesn't warrant funding I'm not sure what does. If I can throw a few bucks at it, please let me know how!

Right, I remembered this because I know an autistic Swedish person whose mother was an Iranian immigrant, just not what the evidence was.

This is a very good example of how difficult can be the biology sometimes.

Different social strata.

Parents working in different jobs, maybe more prone to go in contact with dangerous substances or living in more contaminated areas.

Different diets, maybe relying more in very cheap food choices.

Different country, with different resources and laws that could lead this women to not be fully aware of the local opportunities available in their pregnancy, or how to ask for their rights.

Recent campaigns of hate against immigrants in Swedden, that could lead to a worse treatment in hospitals by one or a few racist members of the staff.

Not able to pay for a premium healthcare while giving birth.

And immigrants live in countries with poor environmental laws and endure a dangerous travel that can damage their health. Dangerous levels of heavy metals were found in workers that had to burn hardware and recycle computers in a third world country to pay for their travel to Europe, for example. Somali people also eat a lot of migrant fish (aka: mercury with fins).

Vitamin D is just one in a thousand of possible explanations

Lets call a spade a spade.

There are evolutionary adaptations to the local environment of Northern Europe that Africans lack: light skin, light hair, light eyes.

There are cultural aspects such as the wearing of veils for women.

This has a significant impact on Vitamin D generation from the available sunlight.

https://sunburnmap.com/ - March 2021, a central European city will give saturation-level Vitamin D generation (before redness appears from preliminary sunburn) to a person with light features in 22 minutes, or someone with the darkest features in 1h40 minutes.

Just as Northern Europeans are evolutionarily and culturally poorly adapted to central Africa, so are Africans to Northern Europe.

This is nothing and easily compensated by changing your diet even if you don’t go outside more often. There’s no valid results from genetics unless you remember diet and environment come after it. So if there’s a problem I’d say it’s because we’re not giving them supplements.

e.g. the last time I went to Hawaii I got sunburned so bad I couldn't go outside for a week.

But it's not true to say I'm racially inferior for Hawaii living or that I'm not suited for going on vacation. What I should've done is wear more sunscreen.

> I once read a theory that it was caused by

One thing that is almost certainly true: ASD doesn't have a single cause. Any theory to explain ASD is, at the very best, only going to explain a minority of cases, and even in those cases quite possibly only partially.

ASD is caused by a complex interaction of dozens of poorly understood factors, and the mix of causes differs widely from individual to individual

It is a very complex phenomenon, and all simplistic explanations in terms of a single cause are doomed to fail

People have linked Vitamin D deficiency to so many diseases that I think it shows more of the statistocal-slopyness disease than anything else.

> That certainly doesn't explain an awful lot of cases.

Doesn't need to explain all of the cases, or even a large minority of them. If it's a significant factor - but a minor one - it will add to the total.

(Sources in another comment I posted)

Maybe... but anecdotally we had an autistic son born when my wife was 26. But we later had 4 more children (including 2 more boys) who were born throughout her 30s and none of them are autistic. I think there is more going on than simple advanced maternal age.

Was that a difficult conversation with your wife about whether to keep trying for kids knowing your first was autistic?

I don't know about this person but I have an acquaintance who is a autistic and has three children, all on the spectrum, and they love them all. It never occurred to them that they should not have more children.

I know a couple that underwent sterilization because they did not want a younger sibling to be burdened with the care of an autistic older brother. They were also concerned that they would not be able to adequately raise another child while also caring their autistic firstborn.

I don't judge, it's a very personal decision and there's so much that goes into raising any child. Our two anecdotes illustrate how easy it is to find people at either end of this continuum. This stuff is very difficult for people to talk about.

No, we never had any sort of conversation of that sort.

I find this a strange thing to ask.

An autist is defined as such by having the following distinct characteristics that make them unique (I have customized each criterion based on myself and my children): - difficulty in social interactions (with neurotypicals) - repetitive behaviors, superior memory and highly focused interests resulting in expert level knowledge - greater sensitivities, physically and emotionally (when compared to neurotypicals.

If I had had a neurotypical child, I'd be worried that I wouldn't know how to relate to them and that they'd have to try much harder to succeed.

Oh for sure there's more to it than advanced maternal age. These things are also probabilistic to some degree (X chances of having a child with X disease). I know many women who gave birth in their 40s to healthy children.

> The increasing rates of Autism now are most likely the result of increasingly advanced maternal age for pregnancies

Wiki seems to say it's either even split between parents, or leans paternal:

> It is not known whether mutations that arise spontaneously in autism and other neuropsychiatric disorders come mainly from the mother or the father, or whether the mutations are associated with parental age.[74] However, recent studies have identified advancing paternal age as a significant indicator for ASD.

There's also the other factors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_autism#Causing...

But as another mentioned, the increased awareness and access to medical professionals could also explain an upward trend in diagnosis.

> the increased awareness and access to medical professionals could also explain an upward trend in diagnosis.

I don't see how any other hypothesis can even be considered until this is controlled for. How many people diagnosed as autistic today would have, had they lived in the past, been considered as having mental illness or intellectual disability? Would those who are high-functioning even be diagnosed as having anything at all, or just thought of as eccentric or a little touched?

What bothers me more is that people on this forum, which is most likely over-represented by the broad autism phenotype, and so quick to 'other' autism. Might not even have dawned on them that they might be talking a little about themselves.

Fair point.

It’s the Back to Sleep campaign that started in the 90s.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaav5188/tab-art...

Basically, sleeping is important to brain development in new borns and infants and forced back sleeping is hugely disruptive. Hence the increase in autism rates for kids born in 90s and later.

It seems like a large leap from “voles develop social bonding problems when their sleep is disrupted in early life” to “making babies sleep on their backs increases the rate of autism”. Is there any other data that would indicate a correlation between back sleeping in infants and autism rates?

That’s actually not what made the connection for me. I noticed my son developed much more quickly than his peers and we stomach slept him. Also my friends got much worse sleep than we did, which surely meant so did their babies. My son hated back sleeping. He’d sleep 3 hours at a time versus through the night. So I looked up when forced back sleeping became a thing and it was strongly correlated to when autism exploded. I think there may be a Euro study. Then I read this recently https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/38/eaba0398

And I emailed the authors about my theory and they sent me the voles study. They can’t do a human study for ethical reasons. Maybe they can find a natural study ala Israel and peanut butter puffs but forced back sleeping is prevalent worldwide as it reduces SIDS. We were comfortable stomach sleeping my son with good air circulation because of this study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Back sleeping may have adverse side effects beyond low sleep quality for baby and parents. Frankly, it’s well established that sleep matters a lot for all brains. It’s not hard to make the leap that reduced sleep quality during important stages of life might matter a lot.

So, this is to be taken with a grain of salt:

A nurse once told me about this. I guess in the 90's(?) or so, there were a lot of children that were cognitively deficient to the extent that they required specialized care and such, but didn't necessarily fall into a category that would allot the parents funding. Lo and behold, autism becomes one of those categories, and the medical industrial complex has no qualms helping families to find funding. Autism is a perfect dragnet, lots of features to latch on to.

Something like that. So maybe a lot of the autism diagnoses fall into the category of "we can't define this, but this family is fucked without the funds, so that's autism."

But I never validated his claims, just food for thought. Good luck in the rabbit hole.

I am so tired of these sorts of articles. Even in a piece proposing that "autism is based on genes that are 70,000 years old and we are basically pattern seekers" they fail to really make the point "Maybe it isn't, per se, a defect at all." I imagine the author is going for that, but the article doesn't really get there. The article comes across like "Autistic guy likes his defect and wants to prettify it by claiming it's a feature not a bug (while we snicker up our sleeves behind his back)."

When do I get to see some headlines asking "Are they really defective? Or did the world just go and get all busier and noisier than in the past while humans kind of mostly stayed the same?"

Re sensory issues (which are often associated with ASD):

My parents couldn't stand noise. They were tyrannical about keeping things quiet so they could sleep.

No one accused them of being autistic. They were just old and set in their ways and spent all or part of their childhoods on a farm where things were quieter than the modern world.

Kids used to be called shy if they weren't social butterflies. Now we take them to a specialist and get them labels like autism and selective mutism and treat them like defective weirdos.

Not everyone is a social butterfly. The human race was never mostly social butterflies.

Also also: social skills are learned behaviors. If kids get less attention from other people and spend all their time staring at a TV or something instead, is it really shocking that they don't have much social savvy these days? Won't this show most obviously in those kids who innately need to work at it to learn it and don't naturally soak it up like a sponge?

(Edited because autocorrect is sometimes an annoying butt.)

I've pondered this a lot and I mostly agree, though your harsh criticism of the flowery articles is a bit... harsh. Personally, I think when people don't get understood in outright saying their point (eg: "I'm not defective, you being a little bit more understanding would go a long way") they end up having to paint imagery for people, and this is the kind of output you get.

It's also a good reminder that the functional degrees of autism only share characteristics, it is still possible (to my knowledge) that these are entirely unrelated and only related on the facade.

I didn't consider it to be flowery.

My oldest son likely qualifies for a diagnosis somewhere on the autism spectrum. He was never formally diagnosed because I homeschooled him, so I didn't need a diagnosis to accommodate his needs. I was his teacher and his mom and I could be kind to my child because I felt like it without filling out forms and defending my right to help him make his life work.

He thinks in pictures and talking with him sometimes feels a little like talking to someone who speaks English as a second language because he makes odd language errors of the same sort as he translates my words into pictures in his mind and then translates pictures in his mind into words to engage in conversation.

Given that this is a labor intensive thing for him, it's hardly shocking he's not very social. Given that a picture is worth a thousand words, he can also be very verbose when you do get him talking.

He's in his thirties and still lives with me. Over the course of more than three decades I have gotten into the habit of using image-rich language because it's more effective communication for dealing with my child.

I adore him and think he's funny and wonderful and the apple of my eye. I've always found him delightful and I wondered why he did so many weird things as a kid rather than wondering how to break him and force him to "act normal."

I have speculated at times that my words seem to be powerful because of this habitual image-rich communication style. That's a two-edged sword and sometimes gets me in hot water when my words hit hard on sensitive subjects.

It's possible I didn't think it flowery because of this aspect of my life. And, so, I don't know what you are talking about or what relevance that has to my frustrations with a world that wants to say "These kids are defective" instead of wondering at what widespread changes have led to this seemingly sudden "epidemic" of supposedly defective kids who supposedly have sensory issues, lack social skills, etc.

> It's possible I didn't think it flowery because of this aspect of my life. And, so, I don't know what you are talking about or what relevance that has to my frustrations with a world that wants to say "These kids are defective" instead of wondering at what widespread changes have led to this seemingly sudden "epidemic" of supposedly defective kids who supposedly have sensory issues, lack social skills, etc.

Yeah, entirely possible. For what it's worth, I was trying to agree. I think I just look at it from a different angle, or may have already arrived on the idea that, society decided what a functioning adult is supposed to do/be, and leaves no room for the idea that this is fundamental evolution at play thus people get pressured into behaving/acting/thinking neurotypically.

My use of flowery probably invokes an imagery I wasn't going for, so that's on me.

Talking to random internet strangers across the globe comes with all kinds of inherent challenges and I'm pretty short of sleep, so there's plenty of room for me to just not be parsing something well today.

You have a good day/night/ whatever.

I would go further than that:

It should be up for question whether the neurotypicals are actually the ones who are "retarded". Just because there's lots of a particular phenotype of a species doesn't mean they have to be the most apt at what they're doing.

- I don't know if I have autism, but I can observe lots of ways of thinking which are deemed as "autistic" by neurotypicals, and to me those are always the ways of thinking which just make the most sense. Or well, at least the high-functioning autism ones to be fair.

The neurotypical way of maneuvering through the world in contrast seems rather childish usually. Things don't have to make sense there. They just are declared as "that's the way it is done, we've always done it like that", and off you go. Sometimes I wonder if such people even think anything at all about what they're doing most of the time.

If you see people as defective rather than simply different and you try to force them to "be normal," you may be actively damaging them and creating a lot of the ways they are dysfunctional.

I am suspicious that some fairly large portion of problems in people who qualify for various labels is rooted in the world actively breaking them rather than some inherent shortcoming per se.

I feel bad saying it, but my experience of neurotypicals as an autist is exactly this and I've wondered the same thing my whole life.

I don't think I'll ever understand why neurotypicals get so emotional about everything. There's often been times in my life where I've tried to make indisputable logical statements based on hard facts, but someone will decide to take offence and complain because the reality isn't to their liking.

My whole life I've had to navigate around childish neurotypicals who can't handle straight forward conversations about things without getting overly emotional. Just look at what happened to James Damore because he made the mistake of trying to use logic with neurotypicals.

When I was a kid it used to really upset me. I got in trouble several times for trying to explain why various religious stories didn't make logical sense. I also got in trouble for saying I didn't like the head teacher which was an objectively true statement. When I look back now I realise it wasn't me who had the problem. If anything it was them.

There is no real neurotypical.

"Normal is a setting on a washing machine."

(Saying from some group I used to hang with.)

Precisely. I know a lot of people, and I know that a lot of those people all display distinctive disorders of one kind or another. Like alcoholism, or risk-insensitivity, body dysmorphia, depression, narcissism, psychopathy. All normal does is describe the fact they can spin about in place for their social contract quota, once that's over they're all fucked up, in one way or another. Some ways are just less salient than others I suppose.

Too often, I feel that when articles and the like discuss different human experiences, it is designed too much as being for an outsider looking in at something alien. People are different, but I wish there were more care to present the center of the discussion, as being part of an "us" rather than something distinctly "other". Studying psychology and meeting other people in the field really turned me off to this kind of thinking--how they would view people with some condition as some sort of oddity, some "thing" to be observed.

I'm open about some of the "bad" and potentially stigmatizing details about my life in part to give push back against that tendency.

I did well in school. I have no criminal record. I'm a decent person and not a drug addict, etc.

And bad things happened to me anyway.

One of them was homelessness and I like to think that talking a lot on HN, where lots of developers and the like hang, about the importance of my cheap tablet and how crucial it was to make my life work while I was homeless helped foster positive changes.

I can't prove that, of course, but it seems a not unreasonable inference.

If only I could find a way to more generally change the focus from big feels and pity and finger pointing to practical details like "Yes, but how do I legally earn a few bucks now while homeless (or whatever)? And how do I stay sane and healthy while trying to fix my problems and get my life back?"

Whining on HN about "I'm on a tablet and can't do X, dagnabbit" used to be a thing I did a lot and then a lot of those issues disappeared. And I wish the world did a better job more generally of hearing "I need a solution for these various practical details -- today, without first having to fix some other problem, like getting back into housing. I need to be able to do X whether I'm housed or not (as one example)."

Often, focusing on othering people boils down to justifying creating problems for them unnecessarily on top of their actual problems. I hate it.

Shy kids are still shy kids. When you can't absorb it naturally on your own even given a normal level of exposure and it's negatively impacting your life, that's autism.

A friend of mine had a child diagnosed with selective mutism. This means she literally couldn't manage to speak in some social settings, something that might more prosaically be called being tongue-tied.

Telling coaches, teachers, etc the diagnosis made things so much worse that she went back to saying "She's just shy." to explain her daughter's social challenges.

That word was not chosen at random. I was involved in a voluntary health and welfare organization for a time and had a spiffy title, though no pay, and lots of people turned to me for support or advice or to share their stories and just talk with someone who would understand.

At one time, I was getting referrals. People would say "You should email this lady about your difficult child." and give them my address.

It never turned into paid work but it is the reason I began blogging.

Headlines like these reinforce my conviction that it was a mistake to group asperger under autism.

I am now quite curious about this book. One thing which seemes puzzling and distinctive about autism is that it appears to manifest much more in males than females (I think somewhat over 4x) - I'd be interested to see how Baron-Cohen addresses that.

In case you didn't know this: autism diagnosis is heavily biased towards how autism typically expresses in males. Autism expresses differently in females, causing to a very high number of women on the spectrum being misdiagnosed as having disorders such as anorexia, OCD or anxiety.

The general consensus in the field is that 4x is an overestimate for the reasons you describe, but the "ground truth" would still be increased prevalence in men. Interestingly there are even some mouse models of Autism where the male behavior is what one might expect from an ASD model, but the females don't really behave differently from controls. There are of course also some models where you can get erratic female behavior. Ultimately I think there's just a lot we don't understand yet.

Women and girls with autism are believed to be much better at hiding their social awkwardness and display more socially accepted behaviour. This leads to more anxiety and depression, which makes correct diagnosis even harder.

Autism is correlated with advanced parental age. Perhaps that improves the evolutionary adaptiveness of a child with a systematizing mindset who will innovate long-term benefits.

Consider it. What do old parents imply? Long life expectancy, social stability, slow life strategy. A systematizing kid with low EQ will do well in such a small tribe. Relationships will be simple and long term investments will pay off.

Now look at how fatherless kids turn out well-adapted for a fast life strategy. That's probably a basic mammalian trait for social species with pair-bonding. Look at how young male elephants are feral unless properly led by old bulls.

But I bet autism is exclusive to humans and maybe chimps.

Simon Baron-Cohen the autism researcher is brother of Sacha Baron Cohen the comedian.

Cousin.

For a moment I thought you were joking. Thanks for the info.

For conversation's sake, my non-scientific guesses on this are that autism may be caused by one of the following:

1) A result of humans living longer and therefore having babies at a later age (i.e. older sperm and eggs)

2) A stage in human evolution where the human body is trying to figure out how to maximize efficient brain power in relation to amount of energy available (i.e. our caveman instincts aren't as important nowadays, so what brainpower-energy could be shifted elsewhere?")

3) Something unnatural that's recently been introduced to human life (which I feel like should be able to be figured out if the families of autistic people answered extensive questionnaires without lobbyists getting in the way).

4) lower infant mortality and in general better healthcare - think about it

Given the amount of scientific and technological progress the human race had made thanks to people on the spectrum it seems fairly obvious to suspect there would be selection pressure for autistically-minded individuals.

I'm sure there are factors that make someone more likely to present as autistic though. I think there is some evidence to suggest that prenatal hormone levels (and specifically testosterone) have some influence, and I believe some researchers have even gone so far to say that the autistic brain is wired like the male brain but to an extreme. It may just be that older woman are more likely to have suboptimal hormone levels which makes these kind of developmental extremes more likely.

Fetal imprinting, perhaps. It'd be hard to quantify. But with all the societal shifts occurring around the 70's, economics drastically shifted. I'm not even going to pretend like I know anything about maternity, but with the constant slew of shit the modern human has to deal with, usually something somehow novel, I'd be willing to point fingers at a shift in the baseline hormone profile before during and after pregnancy. Particularly in fetal development. There's undoubtedly research on the effects of elevated glucocorticoid levels in pre-, during, and postnatal development. But that's only one end.

A big problem with the label "autism" is that it does not seem to map to one, unified, underlying condition.

Intense "special interests" may be useful for some kinds of problem solving but actually maladaptive for others.

Baron-Cohen indeed created a tool to measure it based on his theory which he hints at in this interview: he says autism means that you have a high 'systemizing quitient' AND a low EQ. And of course it's a spectrum. I don't know the validity of this, but it's his rather specific definition. (And it's not about specific interests in general.)

I think that characterization misses some key symptoms in certain profiles of ASD though. Sensory sensitivity can be hugely important. There was a really interesting study where they took a few common ASD mouse model mutations and instead of mutating all neurons, only targeted primary sensory neurons (so nothing in the brain was directly altered!). These mice developed to have very similar behavioral profile to the "normal" models - not just the core sensory symptoms, but more general anxiety, increased preference for objects over peers, etc.

I can't look it up now, but some theories define it as "context-blindness".

Interesting.

There's a hypothesis about ADHD that it's a trait of evolution for Hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with even a few studies favoring the opinion. But that doesn't explain many symptoms of ADHD.

Btw, with many 'gifted' children having ADHD, I am curious whether there is any reason / correlation for it.

Then why in the western world do so many adults and medical professionals try to suppress ADHD with amphetamines?

edit: do you happen to have a source to this theory of linking ADHD to the evolution of hunter-gatherers?

I don’t think it’s correct to say ADHD is being suppressed. People with ADHD take amphetamines to make daily life easier, like actually being able to stick to a schedule, or maintain a clean house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_vs._farmer_hypothesis

Cos shit is actually debilitating and positively mal adapted to modern life.

See also the similar book NeuroTribes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeuroTribes

This looks like a great book that agrees with my life experience.

I would take this with several grains of salt.

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