Neanderthal Theory of Autism and Aspie Quiz?

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No, I thought you were just a hyper super fan who was obsessed with him so you called yourself the same name as him. You know some people online get like that

Yes he's not only super rich but really handsome so you would get a line of admirers!

When you say Carlos Sainz I immediately think of his dad, the rally driver, not Junior.

Yes, he could have called his son something else couldn't he!

I have no interest in celebs whatsoever so would never be like that

But thanks for letting me know of this coincidence I was never aware of.

Don't think I'm judging you, I just thought it was funny. I've met so many people online who are obsessed with racing drivers, it's common in my world to see people naming themselves after them.

It could be a lot worse, couldn't it

Maybe at some point there will be a celebrity called KitLily and I'll get questioned!

I am familiar with the quiz, but not the Neanderthal Theory.

Is there any evidence to support the theory?

Most of the previous work seemed to be a lot of conjecture. I never really gave much stock to it.

I'm leading a genetics project relevant to the topic though and we should have some exciting results coming out this year. I'm just about to start submitting the manuscript, so we'll see what happens...

Basically none.

We are only now finding spots of DNA in the human genome here and there that seem to correlate with autism. Far apart on the human genome( its not like there is one big gene right here on this chromosome that causes autism like the one that causes hemophilia). And although we do now know a lot about the Neanderthal genome I doubt anyone has correlated it with any autism related genes.

That sounds very interesting!

It’s ok no offence taken

Thanks for letting me know of the coincidence

Good. It's nice to have a funny conversation.

Yes, beware. If you post where motorsport fans are, they'll say 'aha, you're a Carlos Sainz fan'. So I'm protecting you from them

That's frequently the case. Considering how under diagnosed it's been in some parts of the world with people that aren't white boys, I'd be hesitant to affix such a regional factor to it.

I could be wrong, but I don't believe that ASD is any less evenly distributed than ADHD, although the lack of effort put into looking for it in children makes it hard to know for sure.

Thanks! Fingers crossed. I'll have to remember to come back to this thread again once it's published.

As an aside to other comments about autism genetics: There's lot of work that's been done and a lot of genetic findings. Granted, some of the strongest findings tend to be related to syndromic forms of the condition, but there's still a lot of good data out there on the spectrum as a whole and many "syndromic" genes have also been associated with non-syndromic autism too. But there several hundred genes in the human genome that have been identified as "major effect" genes and then many times that number of "minor effect" genes. Major effect genes, if mutated, are much more likely to lead to a phenotype like autism, while minor effect genes tend to have only small additive effects and usually require a more complicated genetic picture and/or other effectors, like infection during pregnancy, etc.

But in summary, it's really not accurate to say that very little has been found in the field of autism genetics. Granted, the picture is insanely complicated, but that doesn't mean we haven't identified susceptibility factors. The hardest part though is figuring out what it all means. What is this ultimately doing to brain development?

In my work, aside from studying the relationship between autism and Ehlers-Danlos (my clinical side), I've focused in on the evolution of autism genetic variants. For instance, I've got a paper coming out soon in Autism Research that shows a lot of major effect autism genes are SUPER old-- like, 500 million years plus kind of old. And that a major portion of them evolved as a result of a couple of whole genome duplications in early vertebrates (earliest fish). There were some really phenomenal things going on in brain evolution during that period of evolution, so it kind of makes sense that autism has some of its roots very deep in time. That's not saying that suddenly fish were developing autism but that's when many of these genes evolved and they were probably doing something like adding to the complexity of the brain, adding new brain regions and creating new subdivisions between groups of cells so they could do more specific and even cooler stuff than, say, what a crustacean's CNS could do.

I think Aspie Quiz is very active. It has over 1,000 participants per day, most of which are women high on autistic traits.

As for the Neanderthal theory, I will soon submit an article about human diversity being bimodal. It won't talk about the Neanderthal theory, but this is a likely consequence of hybridization.

Yes. Keep us all posted.