LostInSpace wrote:
Ishmael wrote:
New rule: ignore what rdos says.
New rule? I've had that rule for a while. Ever since I couldn't seem to make him understand that the sample of Aspies who take his quiz online aren't necessarily representative of the Aspie population as a whole, especially regarding demographics like race. Statistics: Learn it, live it.
I agree with that. There are all sorts of problems with using a voluntary response survey as "evidence" for a scientific theorum. I also wonder if racial essentialist tripe like this coming from the aspie community don't alienate aspies of African descent. Besides, most African-Americans have some white ancestry, anyway, and it's not surprising that people in Africa are less interested in filling out onlines surveys, and/or less able to because of lack of access.
There is one human species. All of us are too genetically similar to each other to be considered separate species in the way that a poodle is a different species than a labrador. Some suggested reading: The Race Myth by Dr. Joseph Graves. I haven't read all of it yet, but I have heard Dr. Graves speak and he makes a lot of sense.
I'm a biffed why there's this big push to discover a "reason" for the autism spectrum. What is wrong with the explanation that autism is a part of natural human variation? I see it as a bell curve, though perhaps not a normal distribution. I'm sure many of us have relatives who have more autistic traits than "typical," but not extreme enough that it would qualify as any kind of impairment. An autism diagnosis depends on where a particular person chooses to draw the line on the bell curve, but autism is still part of natural variation just as some people are born 6'10" tall and others have dwarfism.