The possibility that autism is the human evolutionary past

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In the dark? That would be crazy.

What speaks against any kind of activity is that they didn't have any fuel, and if they hunted regulary, they would have needed fuel in order to become warm again after being outside in the cold and dark arctic winter. You also seem to forget that there is several months of total darkness in the arctic during winter-time.

They haven't researched it being neuroidiversity related because there is zero evidence to even imply that it is. The people who got it do have something in common. What they have in common is the northern climate they live in where natural sunlight is in short supply for a certain number of months every year. That has nothing to do with neurodiversity. It has to do with enviroment.

You have not given any plausible reason why it would be adaptive. It isn't adaptive to be depressed during winter. It gives no advantage and even gives a distinct disadvantage in that it predisposes some people to suicide. As best as I can figure you are trying to imply that it keeps people from moving around too much and burning a lot of calories when food is scarce. (You didn't actually say that specifically but I can't figure out how else you would tie together lethargy and scarce food.) But the thing is, you don't need depression to not move around as much. Depression can cause that, but people can conserve calories without being depressed. Non-depressed people would probably have a better survival chance if they could muster up the energy to go hunt a seal or other animal in a far north climate. With no heat, the people who were too depressed to move at all could have frozen to death.

I admit, that is conjecture on my part. But it is conjecture with more plausibility than the idea that depression is an adaption rather than merely an unpleasant consequence of a northern enviroment.

wiki tells me they did it like this:

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



I don't know if you have ever been ice fishing but it is very different from typical hunting. The modern way of doing this is to build a hut on the ice and make a hole in the "floor" and sit around it and fish. I don't know if the Dorsets built huts (i would have to read a book rather than just a wiki to find out) but if they were hunting sea mammals through holes in the ice (as it says they were) this would not require them to do the scurrying-about-in-the-dark-cold that hunting land animals would require. They could sit around the hole as modern ice fishers do and not burn inordinate calories or get too horribly cold. If they built a shelter around the hole as is currently done, it could be quite (ok, sort of) comfortable.

How long ago you came up with it is meaningless.



Hmmmm. Are you saying that instead of proving something is true, it is now true until proven false!

I wonder how much scientific support you would get for that preposterous notion.

(I had to remove the URL. WP seemed to think there was a problem with the URL and kept kicking me into some verification page.)



Your test is useful to give someone an idea of whether or not they may or may not be on the spectrum. I do not see that it can be used to derive any significant insights into Asperger's or Autism until it has been subjected to strenuous scientific scrutiny.

Keep in mind that the people who take the test are most likely to be those who are known to be on the spectrum or those who think that they are on the spectrum. Have there been any kind of scientific studies regarding the test and its methods?

If this was true, everybody that lives in such a climate would have SAD, which is not supported by evidence. That makes your explanation erratic, and we need to move back one stage and add that there is a genetic vulnerability to SAD. Naturally, it is the genetic component to SAD that is correlated to neurodiversity.



I think we can conclude that it is not adaptive in our species, but that doesn't mean it wasn't once adaptive in the source population (Neanderthal). So the reason why we can't view this as adaptive is primarily:

1. We look for it in our species, and the African environment, where it cannot have been adaptive

2. Our understanding of our roots doesn't yet include the archaic species we know we have interbreed with, but instead we view this as "unimportant for human diversity"

But if we look at some key things in the Neanderthal environment, it seems pretty likely they did not hunt during winter
1. Neanderthal adapted to cold physiologically, and not with cloth or heating. That put a limit on their adaptive ability to cold
2. Neanderthal hunted in woods with a close-encounter method, something that would not work in winter-time.
3. Their teeth growth rates are peculiar, but can be understood if they didn't use them during winter

Aspie Quiz have not used input from DSM since about 2005, and instead uses the scientific neurodiversity definition. The big issues with the scientific neurodiversity definition (get the full span and use evenly distributed traits) took about 5 years to resolve.



The scientific neurodiversity definition doesn't depend on actual populations used. It doesn't matter if 90% are neurotypical or if 90% is on the spectrum. That's because factor analysis works regardless of distribution of traits as long as they are not too skewed. The measure for this is called factor congruence coefficients, and they are typically 0.99 for the last versions.

Is there any reputable scientist in the world who agrees with you on this?