Why the Autism Spectrum is Not the next evolutionary step.

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Well , It might sound strange to you but no one actually knows what "the fittest" is,
the term itself point [naturally] to ever changing values and most attempts to assigned it a fixed values terminated disastrously,
guess when someone develops traits which set him apart from the herd he is bound to be counted as unfitted at first,
and perhaps at this context a discussion in an AS forum is not to be read as a claim to superiority of any kind but a legitimate investigation into our nature as many of us are very gifted in fields or perceptions that most of the times deemed unworthy by the current society and our sensitivities collide with the norm.

EVIDENCE PLEASE!!

i see many evidence to the fact of love being the ultimate goal of humanity,
u can see it in the kind and type of problems we as race try to solve through art,science and politics...
even humanity failed revolutions at least points to what we try to do,
BTW
i was born and raised in a Communist-Marxist society(a Kibbutz) and it was a lot of fun.



I've no doubt that monogamy is the highest form of social order
it doesn't mean i miss the Victorian times or see the present system as monogamous
true monogamy can't be forced or treated as a system of contract the way it is done now
what i call progress is the constant emergence of new perceptions and solutions,
technological,mental,political etc.. that point to a future man and systems that will support true
monogamy,
in order to support such a system and such people you need to solve the most fundamental contradictions of our life,love and passion,life and death,time and light,linearity and none linearity....
most of our problems are just manifestations of this basic one and AS are living on the edge as many of us deals with this problems on a daily basis
for instance
the way hearing contradict sight is all ways on the agenda here and in many sites like this
i' m obsessed with the way this contradiction affects our sense of time and space and our well being not because i want to be superman but because it hurts me terribly,
it hurt many of us even worse
what this has to do with monogamy,
what this has to do with our so called possessive or obsessive behavior ?
i can see the connection but it is a secrete

no doubt that life is a mass
but u r making a very sad mistake of seeing the people of the past as having more integrity
unfortunately for us (AS) too many people do the same mistake

At least one person here capable of original thinking and typing at the same time...[a little like walking and chewing gum at the same time]


Operative words being--apart from the herd


Indeed. New research initially indicating our wiring just could be superior.....Imagine that!
[c'mon people you can google it]

Teaching students to think for themselves isn't really the strong suit of public education in western cultures. The purpose seems, rather, a dumbing down of the general population. Getting them to spew facts and have narrow minded views about what is possible. Science is great but not when it becomes a stumbling block to higher awareness. Unfortunately there are signs the schools desire to keep us dumbed down. Judging by the evidence, they're pretty good at it too.


Good one. The answer is most of the frequent contributors here have been assimilated or dumbed down. They don't seem to enjoy thinking for themselves. If you give them a link, they whine and complain if it isn't peer reviewed. They want bona-fide fully documented peer reviewed evidence....won't even consider anything less....a very lazy approach. It may take more courage than they were endowed with?..or conditioned out of them.

Perhaps to many think Darwinism is the whole story. From what I have read evolution from a modern prospective is not a slow progression but sudden radical mutations/alterations.

Who exactly do you mean by "we?" It seems to me that most people just don't care about solving humanity's problems. Good about the Kibbutz.......do those places still exist?


No that's not how I see the people of the past.....just a few things about the past were more to my liking - I'm sure the integrity wasn't very sincere. But at least it was there. Everything is so coarse now, selfishness is worshipped. Society seems to go through cycles, puritanical for a while, then permissive, then puritanical again, etc., so that within one lifetime the rules are changed too much. I want something that doesn't change, a morality I can trust to be the same when I wake up tomorrow. If not, I'm a saint one day and I'm a sinner the next day, yet I'm the same person on both days, so I know that society is wrong. Something like that anyway. It's very hard to explain.

Gradualism is still widely accepted, and there is a great deal of evidence for gradual changes. The best evidence for punctuated equilibrium relates to very primitive early life forms. Gradualism and punctuated equilibrium are not necessarily mutually exclusive models.

I think an over looked flaw of this entire argument is the fact that the autism spectrum in general is extremely obscure once you venture outside of blatantly obvious cases. I have little doubt that a significant of the people both diagnosed or whom believe they have AS or PDD-NOS have either some other disorder that is relative or are within different subgroups that should exist when dealing with HFA, AS and PDD-NOS.

One thing I've noticed while on WrongPlanet is that social awkwardness is fairly common among members. And one of the things that seems to happen is the more socially defeated people tend to fall back more on parts of the ASD labels in their weaker areas... and while the ASD obviously hinders social activity and acceptance... so do things like appearance, attractiveness, wealth, humor, and ability to analyze social situations and develop yourself. I experienced both sides of that coin first hand.

So with those considered you could think about it in a sense where a large amount of the negatives associated with the ASD are not at all related to autism, but directly to blame on society's lack of knowledge and understanding of Autism. When you lose those younger years of social growth you have a real hard time catching up once you become accepted. It took me seven years to get out of a horrible 14 year rut, and I'm just recently, finally, making real progress. Once you break the concept of Autism and evolution down to it's core and dismiss the labels that are associated with it's vauge guidelines and comprehension you have something that can be seen as a genetic variable in humanity's evolution. As it clearly has it's advantages for the species as a whole... considering how AS or HFA core traits are very common in a large portion of the most beneficial and credible thinkers/inventors/etc in history.

Overall I would say that the potential for what autism can bring to the technological table has probably been around for a very long time. The problem being that it appears in a very small percent of the population... and when mixed with high intelligence the percent is dropped further still. So these thinkers, while few to begin with, probably as a whole spent hundreds of lifetimes farming, starving to death, or being silent/executed for tangential thinking. The punishment for thinking differently and not being " normal " is severe even today. And people can only take so much defeat before they are willing to give up and accept what others tell them. As I'm sure a lot of the people on here can relate to. When you have a great idea that makes perfect sense to you, but nobody else understands it, as so blows it off ... sooner or later you're going to put those gifts away and be what people want.

I.E. Society, until fairly recently, had convinced black people, even at the subconscious level, that they were inferior to whites. Black children would choose white dolls to play with, and when asked why they would make statements regarding the white dolls as " good " and black dolls as " bad ". When asked why white was good and black was bad they either had no reasoning, or reasoning given to them by their parents. It took like three hundred years for ignorance to subside, and for it to be okay for black people to be legally considered equal with white people... and even more time before a black person could claim equality with a white person without the threat of violence or ridicule.

The same, in a lot of ways, can be attributed to people within the ASD. I would assume that most children in the ASD spend a significant amount of time not understanding why things are so hard for them before they are diagnosed... if diagnosed at all. Teachers will give them a hard time, students can be like haunting devils to them, and the damage has already been done once they are given a diagnosis. And a diagnosis in itself can have both good and negative affects on perception of oneself and how others perceive you. Now you're still going to be teased... but it's not your fault, because you're " sick ". And the ridiculous lack of understanding regarding autism results in even the most understanding people acquiring a " careful " aura about them... which in itself can be hurtful or demeaning.

For the obvious social misconceptions and the negativity surrounding a ASD diagnosis in the " active but odd " range, it is imprinted in most people, both NT and ASD, that it is something to hide and be ashamed of. So the impact hits even harder when the social damage of who you are being done outweighs keeping it secret, and everyones attitude about you changes once they find out. Which, for me, has been mostly positive... as myself, my father, and my grandfather fit every social diagnostic criteria perfectly and practically extend it further... and it's like the people you care about are drifting away at different speed per person when all you have to do to get them back is reach out and pull them closer whenever they get too far away. Except you can't see, hear, or feel them... and so you can either frantically grab at the air in their general direction and end up pulling them in too close, or not close enough... or you can just sit there and hope they ask you... which is rare.

Overall... and in conclusion ( finally ) of this damn rant. Probably not a fairly new evolutionary trait... and all these posts from people in the ASD who've accepted the concept of them being some sad broken defect in humanity, and who are ridiculing others in the ASD for believing that they have nothing to feel ashamed about ...or who feel in some ways better than NT people, just reinforces the problems I've mentioned. I would really like comments or some information that reinforces the lighter side of autism as being something that needs a cure or something that should be fixed. It seems understandable for a NT person feeling that it should need a cure... but the idea of people within the spectrum ridiculing others for seeing strengths in their " disabilities " is appalling... rant/off

It's that blantant stuff that'll get you every time.

^^^
Ntstanch,
That rant was a very enjoyable read.

Then you go on to say you can end up pulling them in too close or not close enough..
I can really relate to this.

also to me,
perhaps enjoyable is not the word I'll use as u described quite a painful stuff but a lot of it sits very well with my personal experience and thoughts.

Okay wait a minute. I did have this crazy dream recently where the world came to an end, like through biological or chemical warfare I think now in retrospect. Anyway, in the dream, I survived and so did my children. We all went into some underground hiding with like 50 other people, and we all grouped into small cities as they called it. Some sort of threat was still existent on the surface, and we were running out of supplies. A neighboring city had some supplies, and we ended up planning a trip military style (using some old military vehicles) to get them when I woke up. The part I left out, how did we know the neighboring city had the supplies? Facebook.

Maybe these social internet networks are the next evolutionary step.

i have no exact definition of "we" but i referred to the collective and individuals work of humanity,
it's huge amount of stuff,
some of it brilliant and some of it destructive and some times things that were deemed at the times as having no value proved to be quite valuable,
i don't know about "most" people solving humanity's problems but many of them do and care lot more then it seems to be

Kibbutz's still exists,
all of them but 2 who disintegrated
the place were i was born still hold to many of the "old" values,
it's still a community which shares quite equally and the "feel" is still there
i believe it's quite good working model in need of some tweeking
it was interesting(to me) to discover many Kibutz like qualities in the Start ups i was involved with as they were also very flat hierarchically and the workers were given big share of the company,
it works fine as you have to respect creative people if you want them to create
Israeli Start Ups are exceptionally successful
and as far as i know the same is true also for the States where they developed their own version of a Kibutzlike workplace at many places

I'm thinking that the increase of Autism in our lifetimes might be triggered because of a significant evolutionary process that is currently trying to unfold. In other words, Autistic people are the mutated byproducts of a new clade that is beginning to emerge from the line of modern man. Humankind is preparing to become more cognitively superior, and somehow, in the evolutionary process of modern man, certain genetic mutations are beginning to appear in the human genome. To elucidate where people will be able to understand:

Autism is the birth pangs of the coming of a new "homo perfectus".

I have come across this as well. My thought on the subject is this: does evolution necessarily automatically assume continuation of the species? I think that is a little ethnocentric personally. Looking at evolution in terms of ecosystems (apologies for my lack of scientific expertise), maybe discontinuation of one species is necessary for the betterment of the whole ecosystem?

Makes me think of "Children of Men" the movie.