Assortive mating leading to speciation?

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Someone mentioned that Aspies/Auties are one of two groups in human society to experience assortive mating, the other being tall people (although I'm quite sure that many other groups do as well), and mentioned this as a possible driver to speciation.

What do people think about it? Obviously it would require an increase in genetic drift for it to happen on a reasonable time scale (i.e. several thousand years), but what would such a world be like when humans had evolved into different subspecies?

What I find amazing is that humans spent over 50k years in isolated groups and didn't speciate...

Exactly. 50,000 years in isolated groups yet no speciation. Therefore, 3 decades of people in non-isolated groups sometimes pairing up with somebody also carrying autism gene(s) and sometimes not is not going to lead to speciation. If it continues for thousands of years years it still won't. Because isolated groups didn't speciate over 50,000 years.

A lot of times wishsful thinking gets in the way of logic.

I can see us aspies do assortive mating due to special interest but Nts I see would never do it due to a bunch of stuff about true love or other emotional mumbo jumbo. Here in the U.S I'm afraid the nt population maybe unknowingly doing it in the form of females going for the lesser intelligent yet fitted for manual labor males perhaps if this trend continues we'll start seeing males go into a more physical state and less of a mental state of being due to nature believe that is what is needed to attract a female.

How people should mate would be to go by things the same way any other species does! Instead of stuff like true love and all that, what they should do is kind of think 'who would be the best father' and stuff like that. Kind of like kitty cats. They get into fights, and even the ones who lose wait their turn. After all, that's a good quality to have in kittens, too.

You gotta bear in mind that pre-internet and pre-diagnosis it wouldn't have been that easy for Aspies to meet each other because they were probably all at home alone in their rooms!

I don't think that's true although I realize you were just making a joke.

Although human groups may have been /geographically/ isolated for 50,000 years, they weren't truly /reproductivally/ isolated, as where the different groups overlapped or met each other, they wouldn't just breed within their own groups, so there was gene flow. If Aspies/Auties were to speciate from NTs, it would be sympatric, rather than allopatric, speciation.

And...was it me that mentioned it first, by any chance, OP? Evolution happens to be one of my special interests.

Actually I think H. G. Wells had this idea first.

So which are the Aspiest... Morlocks or Eloi?

I meant who mentioned it on WP - I was suggesting the idea on the topic about the AS community the other day.

And we are TOTALLY the Morlocks!

Speciation is far more complex than group isolation. It has more to do with species stasis with respect to their environment. Environmental stability over a period of time helps leads to species stasis, as all of the species in an ecosystem find their niches over time. Sudden environmental change (i.e. changing the rules of the reproduction game) blows the doors wide open for speciation.

Of course, if the radiation dose had been much higher over those 50,000 years, the rate of genetic drift would have been consequently higher, and speciation may well have occured.

Anyway, there's always the possibility of raciation, something that standard fantasy has as a rule - different races, but they can all reproduce with each other. I believe Homo Sapiens was already on the way to doing so...

Different supspecies, still capable of reproduction with each other, would go by the name... Homo Sapiens [insert extra name here]? Going with the Aspie thread, that subspecies would be Homo Sapiens Aspie? And the stereotypical dwarves Homo Sapiens Dwarfus, and goblins Homo Sapiens Goblinus...

Probably you, then.

From biological statistic you need at least 25.000 generation (1 generation = 25 years for humans) for speciation in mammals.

Except that varies based on how much genetic drift there is, how much variation there is between populations... so the actual time for a new human subspecies might actually be somewhat lower than 625,000 years - especially since a human generation varies, now, between 10 and 40 years. So you end up with the interesting spectre of some groups evolving 4x as fast.

Not to discount partial speciation, such as that observed in equine and feline, and to a degree canine, species.

for really cool example of evolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjcFSy1KCTI

The NTs ae the Morlocks.

ruveyn