Is "assortative mating" to blame for the rise of a

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Is "assortative mating" to blame for the rise of autism?

Maybe, but some of the reader comments are pretty crass.

Yep. There was one excellent post about people with ASD not lacking empathy, but the other comments were mostly trash.

If there is one reason why we are rising in numbers it is because our mothers aren't stupid enough to think that vaccines cause autism.

Given how amazingly paranoid most of the posters are I wonder exactly how people contrive that we lack empathy.

Yes, some of the readers' posts were almost cries for a witch hunt!

what is assortive breeding

Click on the link in the original post.

both leo kanner and hans asperger said they saw the shadow of the disorder in the parents.even though bruno bettleheims theory about refridgrators mothers causing autism,his writings do sugest the parents may have had a shadow of the syndrome as well.my father was an accountant and sister is an acountant,my brother is a statistics professor.i believe this theor may be right

But this just seems equivalent to saying that more people with "autistic tendancies" are having more children due to various environments favoring people with more intense focus and techincal skills as opposed to empathy. Which in turn is equivalent to saying that we are an evolutionary adaptation.

So whether they realise it or not, they are saying that we are part of an evolutionary process, unless I'm misunderstanding something?

interesting theory

It's a very good theory! I also believe that there is no rise or "epidemic" in autism. I think it's just that people are getting better at knowing what to look for. People with autism were usualy just considered "ret*d" and locked up in instutions and forgotten about or simply labled as "feeble minded".

Before the term "Asperger's", they were just seen as weird or encentric or "nerds". Many sucessful people such as Albert Einstine and Henery Ford are now thought to have probably had Asperger's. Many people don't realise that the "1 in 150" percent is about all fourms of autism. Not just Kanner's. Autism is a SPECTRUM disorder, it's not the end of the world even if your kid is diagnosned with Kanner's autism.

Some people think that regressive autism is new but I think it's always been here as well. The myths and stories about "fairy changelings" seem to be describing regressive autism. Don't take everything I say as the Gospel Truth, but this is my opinion on the whole autism "epidemic".

More likely, more people are being found to be on the spectrum because the definition of what Autism was changed as more was found out about Autism. The people that are being diagnosed now, might not have been detected 20-30 years ago.

That sounds like a sign of Racial Discrimination there,

But to get back on topic, there has been some studies that people from Age 31 up to Age 50 are in the wildcard of an increased chance your child that gets born will have Autism, something that has really not been talked about, makes you wonder why we have Child and Teen Sex Preditiors on the rise, because they know something that we don't know when it comes to the subject of why more people are being afraid to have a child with a female after age 31 which is usually when a Family does get started in both Religious and standard Marrage issues that will force them to wait until that age to have a child, before you know it, that is where the conflicts of intrest begin.