AS an Evolutionary Condition?

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No. At least, not in the sense that I think the OP is implying.

I've heard a lot of people say that they think maybe autism/insertsomethingabnormalhere is "the next step in human evolution." This is not how evolution works. It's not as though we "get better" over time. The traits that "succeed" (aka: are passed on) are those that make us more fit. Now, fitness does not mean physical strength. It can, depending on one's niche, but for humans, it usually doesn't. Nor does it for jellyfish, etc. Fitness is basically just how well something can survive, attract a mate (or if it's asexual, skip this step), and reproduce. The things that are able to reproduce are thus able to continue to contribute their genes to the gene pool, and so those traits stay around.
Anything that hinders reproduction is unlikely to be passed on, and anything that aids reproduction will be passed on. Autism has little effect on reproductive ability (perhaps in the distant past it would be a hindrance, and today it still can be to some extent), and so autism isn't really a major player in the evolution game. At least, it's not a major player in the way that something like having two heads vs. not having two heads is.

It's the same idea behind why we probably won't lose our appendix. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that they believe in a few thousand years humans will have lost our appendix (and other vestigial organs) via evolution I would be... well, not rich, but I would have a healthy sum of money. Our appendix neither helps nor hinders our reproductive ability, so unless something really out of the blue happens, it's here to stay.

Autism is genetic. Individuals with autism are extremely unlikely to have children according to the statistics (can't find it quickly, but I've read it somewhere). Thus, we would expect the number of autistic individuals to decrease with time. However, this is not the case. A psychologist I know thinks that the children of extremely smart parents are smart squared, i.e. autistic. He also thinks that the incidence has gone up because individuals did not have as much choice in marriage centuries ago (think match maker and isolated villages), but now, intelligent people with similar interests are likely to gravitate towards each other.

If I had meant artificial I would say it. I said controlled. And I gave no examples of retro-viruses. Nobody was doing that in 1905.

That means, like Mendel's work with peas, these things have been witnessed by people active in horticulture, not conducting experiments for the sake of screwing around. Controlled means they are isolated geographically and in planters in green houses(not a lab). Thus, they can only breed against members of their species. Since plants can be bred mother to child safely, these serendipitous mutations lead to new species from singular uncontaminated lineages.

If you call a green house a lab, then so is your house.

I actually worked in a green house and saw the result of mutation on a daily basis. We raised spruce trees for silviculture.. that is, trees that were to replant clear cut forests. Nobody was messing with genetics, it was plant, water, fertilize, sun, harvest, ship. This was purely commercial work. No white coats, see? Between 100k and 150k plants would rest in my hands each day. Dont be confused, I didnt say "near" like you thought I said "artificial", I said in my hands. Yes, thousands per hour. I saw a lot of mutations.

Black spruce is particularly prone to mutation, and it is usually just a curled stem. Typically a 6 month old tree would be 8 inches tall but regularly we would find them double or even triple that height. These were culled and discarded as they did not fit in the shipping boxes. These plants would reach prodigious heights despite being surrounded by 100 000+ of their peers, receiving the same water, same sunlight and same nutrients. The record that I saw was ~23 inches. If you accidentally gave it 2 years worth of fertilizer the lime would burn the roots and kill it. It was a mutant. New genes in your parlance.

Trees were pulled out of the growing blocks and measured to select ideal size by a group of 20 people. Trees were discarded for having an overly small or large diameter(as measured at the base by caliper), and also for minimum and maximum height(with a table mounted ruler). Anything over a certain height would be above snow cover in winter and would die if planted. Small plants would not get sufficient sunlight. These were stacked in groups of 5,10,15,25 depending on the clients needs and passed to me. I did a second brief visual inspection and wrapped and boxed them.

Things had to move fast because then the trees were out of sunlight and could not be watered. So I was one of two people at the end of an assembly line and handled half the plants sorted by 10 people. Over a season it would be several million plants, and over the years it was... lots. 12 to 15 million I estimate.

Very rarely we would see truly novel mutations, like plants with strange shaped needles, or particular patterns in their arrange on the branches.

I'm going to up the ante and tell you how you can see an example of plant mutation, the genesis of a new species, well documented from history, from a time before modern science. How about that?

Go to your local supermarket with your wife and find Romanesco broccoli also known as the broccoflower. You'll find it right next to the regular broccoli. It is a species extant since the 16th century. You might have even eaten it. It is a mutant and a species evolved during recorded human history. Even preindustrial horticulturists kept good records.

Other examples? Why certainly. There is the orange cauliflower, discovered in Canada(1970)... or the purple one created with ages old traditional cross breeding.

Or the McIntosh apple.


Well recorded, witnessed example of mutations leading to new species.

Oh I did some reading. It seems Carrots were white prior to the 17th century. Leeuwenhoek's 17th century Dutch contemporaries must have been doing some genetic engineering, eh? After all, they were already messing with the tulip flower. This is why today you can find so many colors. This eventually caused a tulip market crash, one of the first in the world. This is all very well documented.

This is not science. it is agriculture, horticulture, farming. And mutation.

So why does autism persist? Why hasn't autism been bred out of the human gene pool already? If autism is genetic, and genes that hinder reproduction tend to be weeded out, and autistic people have an unusual difficulty with finding willing spouses, then why are there autistic humans? Why are there no autistic individuals in species, for example deer, whose mental functions are basically devoted to finding food and (avoiding?) becoming a road pizza or something else's lunch?

Could it be that human brains are required to have so many different functions that the aberrant individuals are required because of the need for specialists? Not just autism, but other spectral traits, such as homosexuality, exist among humans, despite the apparent reproductive detriment to individuals who have these traits.

I must not have been clear. I meant to say in the previous post that smart people who get together are likely to have smart and/or autistic children. Thus there will be always be autistic individuals in the future, as a genetic mutation that continually pops up and disappears.

Its probably not determined by one gene and even if it was, that one gene might be recessive. In which case you would have carriers, in which case it would be next to impossible to weed out completely. This is in response to the neurodiversity hypothesis(theory is misleading, it has different qualifications in science then it does for the real world. In science a theory is supported by a lot of experiments and evidence but cannot be totally proven ever, probably).

Last edited by Darkword on 27 Apr 2010, 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

So are you saying that autism exists because being smart is a useful adaptation, and autism is a by-product of the smart genes? Sort of like how sickle cell anemia is a byproduct of genes, which in the heterozygous case, give resistance to malaria?

The same may be true even if intelligence is the product of combinations of genes far more complex than the sickle cell/normal allele pair. It is often the case, that unusual talent (a reproductive advantage) will be accompanied by mild autism, schizophrenia and other traits which are presumed to be a reproductive disadvantage.

Last edited by sgrannel on 28 Apr 2010, 3:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Spectral traits.. i like that term. Good one.

It is not the traits themselves that are detrimental, but the extreme expressions of them. Like tallness, there is a sort of cliff's edge. its beneficial until you cross that threshold at which point it fails to benefit.

Autistics will have to prove whether they are the next step in evolution, at minimum by surviving many generations and at maximum by taking over the world. The fact that a mutation (if that's what we are) has occurred does not confer any judgment about whether it is an improvement.
I bet that we will land somewhere in the middle, doing better than merely surviving, but falling short of becoming the dominant form of the human animal.
We have some strengths and weaknesses and as one poster suggested will probably do best complementing what NTs are good at in a symbiotic fashion.

That's an unfounded assertion. For one, we don't know what the "smart genes" are, so to imply there is a relation at this point is haphazard. Especially considering the majority of those with Autism are certainly not geniuses.

Adaptations do not serve the human race (or any species as a whole), that's not how evolution works. If a mutation does not increase a single individuals fitness, then it is not favored by evolution, end of story.

I think that homosexuality is similar to autism in that homosexuals are unlikely to have children of their own-- they are more likely to adopt. One out of every one hundred children is autistic, and they say 10% of humans are gay/lesbian. I think its just a matter of probability. When zygotes form, there are random combinations of tens of thousands of genes. Geneticists have been unable to pinpoint a particular gene or genes as the cause of all autism cases-- maybe its because there are many different combinations that result in autism? Or that certain genes are up to 100 X as likely mutate than others ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation )? Or that certain common genes, when combined upon fertilization, result in autism/homosexuality?

I agree with this. I took a course in Biological Evolution in university this year. One really basic thing that I never fully understood before is that Evolution is NOT considered a hypothesis anymore. It is not a theory in the sense of a hunch or a guess. It is a theory in the scientific sense. It is a principle or class of principles put forth to explain a class of phenomena. These principles must be supported by a large body of evidence to be called a theory. Germ theory (that germs are what make us sick) is an example of a theory, so is gravitational theory.

I lack the ability to believe, first off. I can not do it, I consider an expressed belief the same as a lie.

Secondly, if animals didn't evolve, then what is your explanation for whales having hip bones?



I suppose we just made it up to trick those who don't worship evolution, huh?


The problem is, science, including evolutionary theory, does not claim to be absolutely correct.

Religion does, perhaps you weren't aware of this, especially with the damage done to the public impression of science from the global warming "the science is settled" crap.

That is politics posing as science, the real thing doesn't include statements like that, they are oxymorons, science is a process of gathering information, making conclusions, and suggesting new avenues to pursue knowledge along.

It is only settled when you start treating it like a religion, and it isn't science any more when you do that.

I appreciate your attempt at helping me, but there are still a few problems that remain unsolved with the myth of evolution.

What you're basically describing to me is a kind of cyclical variation. If that's true, I mean, if that's what evolution is, then you can use crossbreeding of plants to show evolution both in a natural setting, in greenhouses, even a laboratory. There's nothing new about that.

Here's another example. You can spray insects with, say, DDT. You can expect many of those insects to die out, but the ones that remain have a degree of resistance (genetic) to the poison. Of course, those are the ones that will breed to produce more insects that are resistant. Over time, of course, you can develop a population that is highly resistant to the poison. HOWEVER, if you discontinue use of the poison, what will happen over time is that insects that are not resistant to DDT will creep back in and the population will return to its previous state. The changes brought on by the toxin are not permanent, in other words.

The same thing happens to penicillin-resistant bacteria, hence we have a variety of antibiotics available each must be used up entirely over time to wipe out an infection, leaving none to build up resistance.

The kinds of changes you're talking about in plants doesn't really cause any permanent changes--selective crossbreeding can return them to a former state or introduce even more variations. The changes are not permanent and are not significantly large-scale enough in complexity. Those are adaptive variations, not macroevolution.

If macroevolution is absolute fact, as many seem to claim it to be, it doesn't address the issue of all the information packed into every single living being that makes all the processes of the body and brain possible. Richard Dawkins would say something along the lines of every cell in a human body contains more information than all the volumes of an encyclopedia. We all have trillions of cells in our bodies. How is it all that information packed in all those cells able to work almost at near perfection? Evolution would suggest that it's all by accident.

With all the scientific evidence that has been put together to make macroevolution even a theory, you'd think that science would have discovered a distinct process by which all that information could be made to work in a creative way. Think of all that information like a computer program. Computer programs can't just randomly happen. Some creative process has to occur to bring all that information together to run a machine. If you can't prove any similar creative process through evolution, then you don't have any kind of smoking gun evidence to stand on. All you have are a bunch of moths that change color with their environment and some funny-looking flowers. Those are adaptations, and nothing new is really demonstrated here.

Uh... psst, hey, ever heard of DNA?



Yeah... uh, that stuff is like, information.

It is actually using the least information to produce the most results, as nature tends to find the path of least effort in all cases that it is able to do so.

Roughly 750 mb is the most information the human genome could hold, it could be less if the information isn't exactly coded with flawless ordering.