See also the similar book NeuroTribes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeuroTribes
This looks like a great book that agrees with my life experience.
Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
71–80 of 100 posts
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#72I 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…
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…
There is no real neurotypical.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There is no real neurotypical.
"Normal is a setting on a washing machine."
(Saying from some group I used to hang with.)
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#74Interesting. 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 facto…
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.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#75For 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 import…
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.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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...
Right, I remembered this because I know an autistic Swedish person whose mother was an Iranian immigrant, just not what the evidence was.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#78I 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…
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.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#79Fuck, no.
Autism is inability to deal with ones own emotions due to some genetic mutations.
It is clearly and verifiable inherited and carried by pretty women who are less affected, being compensated by motherly instincts for social enpirements.
Women are traditionally more emotional and rely on feeling, so society (families) readily accept autistic women as long as they do their duties.
Physical beauty (mostly face) guarantee a marriage. This is how autistic traits are not washed out.
Each autistic person develop his own behavioural patterns to compensate being overwhelmed by his own emotions. (Depending on severity these patterns vary from Turing to Rainman so to speak). This is the main principle.
Everything else is just bullshit.
Re: Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
#80I 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…
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…
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.