The possibility that autism is the human evolutionary past

Post Reply New Topic

That's a very inflammatory statement.

Can you provide evidence to back it up? In what way does the scientific people want to kill people who are Autistic?

Isn't that obvious? You wrote that if the number of autistic people born would greatly reduce, which I cannot interpret any other way than as a genocide, this would come from the scientific community, which would make the scientific community guilty of genocide on the autistic population.

Because you didn't write that children with autistic traits would get better treated or could be born without disabilities, which would not be genocide. You wrote that their numbers would greatly reduce, which cannot mean anything else than genocide.

Although I'm not sure what you mean by "born with Autism" is supposed to mean either. You are using a deprecated notation, and you also should know that you cannot be born with a diagnosis, and the diagnosis cannot be made on infants.

The study found that single genes cannot explain much of autism, but when analysing complexes of genes these clustered well with ASD. This is what we expect from an prehistoric introgression event. Single genes don't build-up a species, gene complexes do.

Actually, Autism appears to be more than merely genetic in origin. In many cases, genetics may increase the risk of Autism without being the entire cause. One possible approach to reducing the number of cases of Autism, or at least the severity of the condition, might be to reduce other non-genetic factors, if possible.

There is, for example, current research going on into what appears to be a connection between Autism and low Vitamin D levels in the mother. If this pans out, a push to raise Vitamin D levels in women trying to get pregnant could possibly help to reduce the number of children born with Autism even if they do have genes that increase their risk for Autism just as women trying to get pregnant are strongly encouraged to take Vitamin B12 to reduce the chances that the baby will not suffer from Spina Bifida.

I am sure, to a degree, that there will also be those who perform genetic testing on the fetus with the idea of aborting the baby if any of a number of problems are found. That is quite unfortunate.

So what evidence is there to suggest that prehistoric events are necessary for gene complexes?

The last sentence doesn't make any sense.

IMHO, they are going about this in a totally backwards way. The first thing that should be done is to exclude neurodiversity (see my scientific definition in the other post) from ASD and ADHD. DSM 5 does part of this job by removing AS (which is very highly loaded to neurodiversity) as a diagnosis, but it doesn't go long enough. Once you have eliminated human diversity from the picture, you can then try to cure things that are not human diversity.

What they essentially proved was that the scientific neurodiversity definition is a real thing even at the gene-level. Which we should have expected when it is a real thing at the behavioral level. If you remember the scientific neurodiversity definition, it stated that factor analysis resulted in a major factor when evenly distributed traits part of human variation in a dataset. The fact there is a major factor is because all the traits involved in neurodiversity are correlated rather than independent. If they were caused by random mutation in a lineage they would not be correlated.

you just explained back to me what i originally explained to you, but you added a bunch of information that would not apply to this situation. i was arguing that autism is usually selected against because autistic individuals have less chance of producing offspring:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection

also:


http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrar ... sconcep_04

thus autism should become less prevalent in the population overall. most researchers believe that this hasn't occurred because some people with the traits may gravitate towards each other, but also brand new autistic children are arising all of the time because the traits are carried forward in NT individuals. they have fewer than the minimum number of genes that would be the preponderance that crosses them over into an expression of autism. this referred to as "threshold genetics":


http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/fil ... d_etal.pdf


they are clear, they are just not really supportable by any research at all.


i tried looking for some information on this phenomenon, and i could not find any. so i would need to see a source on that.


i found a couple of papers (the same one i quoted above as well as one other) that discussed autism in prehistory. here are the 2 of them, with the second one essentially overturning the first one:

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/8638/3/Autism.pdf
http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/fil ... d_etal.pdf

at best, the archaeologists are only looking at whether aspies might have made contributions that helped to significantly push society and technology forward, but there is NO discussion as to whether ALL of prehistoric humans were autistic (as your bolded text suggests). that is your hypothesis, not theirs.


this doesn't really help your case. the gaping holes in your hypothesis will not be plugged with passion.

I find the whole human diversity argument ludicrous. I'm sorry. I know that's cynical and mean, but it's laughable.

Are a lot of "disorders" non-favored expressions of genetic diversity?? Probably.

Does that make a lot of people feel better about themselves?? That whole different, not less thing?? Probably.

Guys-- take a look at what happened to Neanderthals when Homo sapiens hit the scene. It's pretty widely believed that Homo sapiens deliberately excluded (pretty speak for "exterminated") H. neanderthalensis.

We're discussing a dominant, violent, bloodthirsty species that is the most effective killer among a tiny handful of mammals that have been documented to kill for fun.

I don't think pleading "genetic diversity" is going to get us very far.

If anything, it's going to cause us to be construed as more of a threat.

There it is.

Look-- when they're looking for a test that will allow us to detect autism in a fetus, there's only one reason.

They can make whatever noises they want about early interventions, being able to plan ahead, whatever (although that, too, is mostly about making everyone fit the majority mold). What they're really doing is giving the prospective parents the opportunity to be strenuously advised to choose abortion.

That is genocide. Killing a group of people is killing a group of people, whether you are marching adults into a gas chamber or sucking out fetuses with an industrial vacuum cleaner.

For the record-- politically, admantly pro-choice. It's not my right to tell others how to live. Personally, I damn near blacked both my father-in-law's eyes for suggesting that I should abort my now 9-month-old daughter on the grounds that I have "bad genes and too many kids already." Ableism saved his ass-- if he'd been physically strong and not in a wheelchair, I would not have been able to restrain myself from having at the f*****g a**hole.

Eric76 and Hyperlexian, here is a paper on behavioral modernity:

http://volgagermanbrit.us/documents/klein2000.pdf

Eric76, I can't show you any "aquatic lung papers" because there aren't any. That is why I proposed a research question. But here is an article where I get one thousand genes:

http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/05/a ... r-fathers/

A quote from that article: State estimates from the new data that there are likely to be 500 to 1,000 genes associated with autism and that each one will account for 1% or less of the risk in the population.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/05/a ... z2OFT37pr3

Hyperlexian I did not repeat back to you what you said, but it appears we are going to talk past each other when it comes to evolution. Yes it is my hypothesis, not archaeologists, that ALL prehistoric humans
were autistic. I thought I made that clear, and when you say "they are clear, they are just not really supportable by any research at all" it makes me wonder if it is really clear to you at all.

I realize passion will get me no where. I had a bad day yesterday on many levels and I sincerely beg your forgiveness. That said, what "gaping holes," as I think my hypothesis is clear? Can you please be very specific.

with the Behavioural Modernity - i did not realise you were just talking about the period when modern behaviour emerged - i thought you meant some previously unknown period that we didn't have culture as we know it. archaeologists can't even agree on when this exactly happened, or whether it was steady or sudden.

some issues with your idea:

1. the integration of autism in prehistory is contentious at best, and there is absolutely no evidence that more than a minority of individuals were autistic:

http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/fil ... d_etal.pdf

2. the genetic connection to mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD and depression. if autism is a distinct species, then so are they. what evolutionary "advantages" did they provide?

3. autism doesn't meet the definition for species now, so it is unlikely that it would meet the definition for a separate species in prehistory

Last edited by hyperlexian on 22 Mar 2013, 8:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think anyone has suggested that mankind has not evolved over time. It is a big step to jump to some kind of "line of Autistic man".



There may be 500 to 1,000 genes associated with Autism, but that doesn't mean that they are all present in any one individual.



There seems to be a problem with your link. This link is for some spot within the previous web page, but it doesn't seem to exist.



"ALL prehistoric humans were autistic"? That's absurd.

You really should go to school and earn a doctorate and then start doing real research.

That would mean not curing anything at all.

Saying it's part of diversity doesn't indicate whether it's a good or bad trait. Everything is part of diversity. Every possible way that two humans can differ is part of diversity, whether it's having an IQ of 150 or being stillborn with cyclopia.



Incidentally, I recently got tested by 23andme. By some research, I managed to get together a list of 81 SNPs that I was tested on and that at least some research suggests are linked with autism. Of those, I am:

homozygous for the non-autistic allele for 17 SNPs (no copies of the autism-related allele),

heterozygous for 26 SNPs (one copy of the autism-related allele), and

homozygous for the autistic allele for 38 SNPs (two copies of the autism-related allele).

And that's probably only a fraction of the autism-related SNPs that actually exist. But even so, you can see that a single autistic person will not typically have all of them, just a heavy loading of them.

Eric76 sorry about the problem with the link I think it's because maybe I'm a Time subscriber and it's behind a paywall?

Hyperlexian thank you for being specific, let me address your points.

1. I am arguing that it was NTs that were integrated with autism, that NTs are a harsh environment adaptation that became successful and went on to have dominance, which is why human genetic diversity is remarkably low. You really have to understand the totality of what I am proposing.

2. There are arguable advantages to ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. I am no way saying this is not contentious. Here's one article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magaz ... d=all&_r=0

I also highly recommend the book "Neurodiversity" by Thomas Armstrong.

But the article you gave me by Pickard et al. could also be an explanation, as in, if autism is the human evolutionary past, and it is linked to depression, schizophrenia, etc. then you could argue that , to quote
from the article: "these conditions were a deleterious by-product of this evolution rather than part of the causative mechanism."

3. I'm sorry, I still argue that it does. Autism appears to have its own niche construction strategy and that is why I say it is its own species.

Eric 76 thanks for calling my hypothesis "absurd." I'm glad you grasp the gravity of what I am proposing. What I do not think is absurd is the modern evolutionary synthesis between genetics and natural selection. Frankly the disease paradigm was shattered when researchers discovered how strongly polygenic autism was. It is no longer a question of if evolution is related to autism but how.

1. you still do not have any evidence to back up your assertion. basically, the researchers can hardly agree whether autistic individuals had any impact on human prehistory at all, and the evidence points to the possibility of the possibility of a small impact. there is no evidence for any other scenario, like an entire autistic culture. what you are proposing makes no sense given the facts.

2. other mental illnesses are not new. they are as old as autism, and if they are on the same genes then it defies reason to think that autism is some sort of source of modern human culture whereas the others are simply side effects of evolution.

that article you linked to was completely irrelevant because you were discussing cultural and human evolution, not the upsides of depression in modern society.

3. you would need to provide some sort of scientific evidence for that, and so far you have been negligent in that regard.