The future of Autisim!

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Only if autism rates increase from what they are now will autistics outnumber nts.

Wavefreak the way in which you have tried to socialise with me is highly dysfunctional, I understand and I want to tolerate people with different communication skills/styles but you should know you sound rude to me and probably to other people, I'm not offended but I just want you to know in case you offend someone else. There is no need for me to write pages and pages on this topic to get my view across, I simply feel that neuro-diversity is an essential asset to a group species like ours and groups of people/society/culture etc should be less conformist, less demanding and more tolerant and compromising to ensure neuro-diversity can flourish. There are many people who aren't of value to society right now (though I disagree this degrades their value in the larger picture) and who are suffering who could be doing great things and having a pleasant life if they were in a different environment. I don't think people should be looking at which genes to remove to make everyone fit in, they should be looking at what changes to make to society to allow people to fit in and flourish. Then again I live in the UK perhaps it's a cultural thing, I've heard that the UK has a tradition of celebrating eccentrics and there are Brits who go to the USA for things such as gender selection as it's illegal here. Regardless I feel gene selection is a potentially dangerous and self-destructive door to open even if it can prevent some things that are almost indisputably unwanted.

This is how I feel, don't be angry that I don't think in the same way as you on this topic, personally I would ban all gene selection.

Maybe some AS scientists can find a way to eradicate the NT genes anyway?

Ultimately I think that many people would wipe out many genes if they could but the people with the knowledge and power to do so are smart enough not to. This is my speculation on the original topic "the future of autism".

And you can tell all this from a few posts in an internet forum? You judge me rude based on a few hundred words of written text regarding a controversial topic. Would you feel better if I used more smilies?



This says it all.

I have lived Asperger's for nearly twice as long as you. Yet your opinion is worth infinitely more than mine.




I haven't your faith in humanity. We only need to look at the behavior of those with power. There is a wealth of evidence throughout all of history that shows the powerful do what is necessary to retain power. Whether in small things or large, the powerful serve their own interests first. Maybe they will throw us a bone and let us autistics live under their thumbs for some perverse entertainment or to assuage their guilt for trampling the rights of the masses. Oh. Wait. Never mind. That won't happen because they don't feel guilty about it.

So you don't understand what autism is or how natural selection works. Keep up the good work!

I disagree with these numbers - if 20% of the autistics are sucessful, this mean that 1 in 5 autistics are participating fully in society ; the 1 in 500 ratio will be 1 autistic in 500 people (autistic or not), not 1 autistic in 500 autistics.

You are correct. An arithmetic error. It doesn't change the point I was making which is that there are many more autistics functioning beneath the standards of performance expected in this culture than at or above those standards. Any rational calculus that would measure autism's cost to society would take this into consideration. If you could show, rationally and conclusively, that the few autistics that excel contribute more to society than what is spent supporting those on the opposite end, then you might have an argument for allowing autism to persist. This probably sounds very dystopian, but these are precisely the types of calculations that are performed, even if not explicitly. When it comes to allocating resources, altruism is supplanted by pragmatism. It just costs too much money to support disabled people. We live in a society that increasingly values money above all else, all other rhetoric not withstanding. If this value system is not abandoned, autism, along with any other condition that falls on the wrong side of the cost equation, WILL be eliminated.

Not necessarily true at all.

You neglect the many autistic people who are quite sensitive to the world around them, and incredibly nimble on their feet. I was such a person as a child, are you telling me you've never heard of the near-stereotypical autistic people (like me) who could walk along rooftops, on fences, climb trees and never fall, etc? We're just as sensitive to the world around us as the clumsy ones.

Of course some of us are both nimble and clumsy. Nimble when we are facing a situation where something is triggering the movement for us, and clumsy (or unable to move at all, in extreme cases) when having to do voluntary movement with no triggers to help us. These are movement difficulties that are well-known in many other neurological conditions, many of which don't involve heightened senses in the least bit.

No, disabled does not mean broken. It means having patterns of ability and difficulty that lie outside of the ones that your society has planned for. If the world planned mostly for autistic people, then nonautistic people would be disabled.

Some people love to point out that autism involves difficulties that would be painful even if everything were planned around us, and that this somehow negates what I just said. It doesn't. In a society where all our needs were planned for, then whatever painful aspects of our conditions existed, would be considered just part of the pain and suffering involved in the human condition. That is what the (many, many) painful parts of being nonautistic/nondisabled are considered right now. People who point that out (that there's pain and suffering involved even if everything is planned for) tend to not understand quite the depth of what happens when a type of person is planned for, how it warps people's understanding of both that sort of person, and those who are not planned for. They see it only on a fairly shallow level. If everyone was planned for, then the pain and suffering involved for each kind of person, would have both a huge amount of strategies for dealing with it, and be considered part of what a person could just expect for being human. People forget that aspect of it because it's not as obvious as (in the case of certain physically disabled people) the absence of curb cuts or something. They neglect how attitudes are drastically affected by this kind of thing.

Ok. I think I understand. For example, death in your family is painful and there is just no getting around that. But this pain is considered part of the human condition. It is dealt with using funeral rituals that help people process the pain and also others will treat you very gently when somebody in your family dies. Nobody expects you to be at your peak performance on anything and expect you to be very challenged and need others to do things for you, at least for a while. It is a common custom to bring bereaved people food because they may be too emotionally disabled to cook.

But what if there was a person who grieved for dead family but nobody else in the culture did? (Or only 1% of the other people did.) There would be no funeral rituals to help with the pain. The pain would be considered aberrational instead of expected. The person would be considered emotionally disabled because they could not function normally even though by rights they ougt to be able to. Nobody would bring them casseroles to get them through the tough week after the death. Or maybe they would, but it would be considered an inexplicable inconvenience and part of the aggravating cost of this disability.

This what-if scenario is just my attempt to process what you are writing.

Yeah it's very much like that. Much more involves cultural beliefs and what cultures plan and adapt to (and what they don't), than people tend to realize even if they believe that some stuff (like curb cuts, etc.) involves that.

I actually don't believe in evolution or natural selection so much, people like to say they know things but no one really knows why we are here or how we got here. What I was ultimately trying to say is that perhaps everything that is here now is here for a reason and has a right to be here. I believe in evolution on a larger scale, that our physical particles are changing or even evolving through time but then again that is limited to the view of only one temporal dimension so it becomes quite different when that limitation is removed and I don't want to think too much about this right now.



I take that back but you were sounding like someone who was ignorant of autism to me and trying to prove it was a negative thing with numbers and "evidence" rather than actually knowing it intimately. That's why I assumed you didn't but if you do I take it back.

Even with this view I believe rather than trying to eradicate certain types of people those in power would focus on making even more mentally diverse people, in fact when I think about it there are a few films like Serenity and Minority Report where this is abused by those in power.

Of course it is speculation but the topic is about the future.

No worries.



The topic was about the future of autism. I was saying what I thought would happen, not necessarily what I would prefer happen. I don't believe anyone should be forced to take a cure, but I would not think less of someone that does. I firmly believe in the rights of the disabled. But I am a pragmatic, even cynical, person and I am under no illusions about this world's disdain for my autism.

I believe in the usefulness of diversity even if it can cause clashes, at the moment it hasn't really been capitalised on, there are always a few great people with disabilities to pay for their genius but if it was capitalised on there could be many, that's why I believe even in a highly dystopian future there will still be a place for autistics and rather than there being a homogenisation there will actually be more diversity than ever. The future I actually hope for is one of many different cultures loosely held together, I wish I had somewhere to live where I feel free because I feel trapped in a society I don't belong in. Either way I don't see anyone with sense wanting to do something like wipe out autism.

WTF exactly does this mean? Do you really think the "world" doesn't like your autism as opposed to the fact that autism is a mutli-billion dollar problem and it would be quite useful to try to figure out how to solve it? It sounds like you think the world has something against you personally or you are allowing autism to "own" you somehow.

Not saying you are saying this but... It kills me how WP members think "cure" autism means to eradicate them or change them by significantly altering their brain neurology. There will NEVER be that sort of "cure" for those of us who currently have autism. WAY not enough time for the field trails of such a thing for any of us. There may be solutions offered that help our symptoms but that is no different than offering a specific "diet" or "occupational therapy" or even anxiety or depression meds today. All of these things alter our brain neurology btw (see "brain plasticity"). There are all manners of "cures" for our ASD symtoms in that regard and these things will only become better (crossing fingers) with research funding.

In my dreams, I envision a "cure" that eradicates the type of autism that destroys people and renders them unable to function at any reasonable level and I see this being adminstered to pregnant ladies so that their child would not be dependent forever on his parents and on society. But that is just my dreams...

I dream that this cure is a change of society and environment that allows them to be strong and independent and a part of a society they understand and want to be involved in, not a drug that is administered.

I believe that it is the environment destroying people rather than their own minds in most cases. I understand wanting to get rid of the negatives but I think there has to be a balance so I don't like the idea of messing around with that.