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

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

#91

Post by dogma1138 »

caddemon wrote: post #50
dogma1138 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#92

Post by h0l0cube »

schwartzworld wrote: post #90
h0l0cube wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, re…

> 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 a…

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.

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

#93

Post by ArkanExplorer »

pvaldes wrote: post #89
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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 opportun…

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.

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

#94

Post by ta988 »

astrange wrote: post #14
QuercusMax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

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

#95

Post by schwartzworld »

h0l0cube wrote: post #92
schwartzworld wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

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.

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

#97

Post by Cyberthal »

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.

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

#98

Post by astrange »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #93
pvaldes wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opportun…

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 generatio…

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.

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

#99

Post by astrange »

astrange wrote: post #98
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generatio…

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.

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

#100

Post by zikzak »

david-gpu wrote: post #42
zikzak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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