Asperger: feast or famine?

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Would you call Asperger Disorder a feast or famine gene expression?

Last edited by Griff on 09 Aug 2007, 10:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

That sentence makes me hungry.

Both.

What exactly do you mean by that?

Feast when I am with other Aspies and can mind-wrestle, famine when I have to deal with all the idiots in the NT world.

But then again it is hard not to come across many idiots when I have an IQ of 142.

Star

I was not sure either my guess he means. Did ASD gene frequency increase in response to some disaster in the environment or did it result as a novel solution to a common environmental situations. Which might imply its not adpative in the current "feast" period of human evolution if you call it a famine gene?

With rising rates of autism in highly industrialized countries, which are truly lands of plenty, maybe it is feast--if by feast genes the poster simply means genes that in times of plenty are more likely to be expressed.

I don't think that's a very healthy attitude. My verbal IQ is 147, but I don't think of the people around me as idiots. Everyone has their own strengths.

I think I understand what Star means, though. I've never taken a formal IQ test, the only one I ever did was while I was on holiday and someone else had a "test your IQ" book, the first test was aimed at those in the average, topping out at 138, and I went off that scale easily, getting only a couple of the 150 or so questions wrong. I tend to be very verbose, and I'll go into what I'm talking about in great detail. Seems like it's easy to lose people when you do that, and it's easy to start looking down on others when they give you this blank "I have no idea what you're talking about anymore," look.
(Also, it doesn't help that I'm working in data entry where the written info I get is definitely from people at the lower end of the spectrum - how hard can it be to read a clock?)
I have to fight hard not to look down on most others. I like to think I do pretty well a lot of the time, but also a sense of intellectual superiority was about the only thing that got me through school and the bullying that came along with it, so I'm fighting against years of training myself to treat others like that as a self-preservation mechanism.

I, too, don't really understand the question here.

Mmaestro

Oh, excuse me. My intelligence comes in slumps and surges. I should have been more clear. By "feast or famine," what I mean is having a pretty matched set of unusual strengths and unusual weaknesses. You're either completely lost on something or wonder why others can't do as well as yourself. This is what I mean.