Heredity or life history?

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Perhaps there is not such a clear cut distinction between NTs and people in the so called autistic spectrum. As some one has a better musical memory than others, or has a greater capacity to reproduce a motif, or to draw portraits, or even more rare, make caricatures, or have more instinct in political leadership and maneuvering, in the same way there might be a continuum between a complete incapacity to establish and maintain relationships. Looking back at my life I take stock of the fact that as far as I am concerned I was never capable of relationships. Too vulnerable or incapable to read in mind of others? Probably both but what was that was prevailing. It’s difficult for me to judge, but I think that there is no easy answer, and that tests are too rough to be relied on. When a streak of autism runs in the family it’s hard to know in what measure the social incompetence is due to an harrowing experience of the parent-child relationship, and what is due to genetic transmission. I only raise some questions. I have no definite answer. People here may contribute with their life histories.

the question of nurture vs nature (environment vs genetics) is a very difficult topic. at this point, i don't think it's been teased apart.

Breaking news (crash!)

My personal opinion is ... I don't know. I spent a while wondering if I had AS but now I think I'm NT and was antisocial mainly because of being bullied while young. And the stimming I do isn't outside the average amount.

I found an article on Slate that talks about the study (its not technical but contains links to more technical sites.) However there is always the addage "there are three types of lies. Lies, damn lies and statistics." Does anyone rember the supposed link between vaccines and autism. Turned out to be incorrect.
Heres the link for the article.

http://www.slate.com/id/2151538

As a parent, I would say it's genetic. But genetics are very complicated, so everyone's still unique, even if they have similar, unusual mental and behavioral patterns.
I saw the unusual in my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my husband, and now I see it in one of my sons. They're all different from each other, but even more different from everybody else! (and I love them all!)

Long before I heard the term Aspergers....I assumed and my therapists assumed,that all my problems stemmed from being adopted .My alcoholism and depression were genetic(long family history).If you look at something with a microscope....you will notice different things if you view it from magnification of 10 or 100....it will look like two totally different objects.I dont think the nature and nurture are exclusive.You can not separate their effects from the individual they effect.I still have much to learn about AS and my biological family,that I have recently gotten to know.It is important for me to understand which parts of myself are influenced by genetic or psychological factors.I cant change genetics but how I go about making changes in my life will be based on "what" is "effecting what.

Hmmn, I get a lot of traits off my dad, I think certain factors are genetic, but the way in which they come out is psychological.. Meaning my dad has almost all the same aspergers traits as me, but because he's been hiding it inside for many years and blaming everyone else he meets instead of focusing on himself, he's become very, very obsessive, in ways related to cleaning, the house needs to be in a certain order, he freaks out when my mum doesn't appear home exactly on time etc.

For me its sometimes seemingly opposite results (I hate cleaning) but the same direct cause, I'm obsessive (and can only handle one focus at a time), I freak out when my partner doesn't let me know she needs to get away for a while or whatever, but for me its not about her following a certain routine with me, its about me needing a resolution for problems we may have. I'm worse with people than my dad, but at the same time he threw his obsessive nature into my mum from the age of 19ish, whereas I've spent my late childhood and teens obsessing with sound and science.

I'm thinking genetic factors play the key role in passing it on, and environmental factors determine how its actually presented to the world.

I think nature determines weather or not you have autism, and nurture determines how you cope with it. I also suspect that it's posible that if an autistic child is raised in a good environment they will be less severe and more severe in a bad one.

Certainly when you are constitutionally fragile, heriting autistic traits from your family, you are in desperate need of love, attention and protection, while you have little chances to find this things in the partents with autistic streaks. Moreover viciuos circles take in, because your parents (who don't know of their own problems and deficiencies - there is not much self analysis in these cases) are unhappy with you and you suffer, more than a normal child, from their affective avarice and repay in kind. So the chasm widens and widens.

definately, my upbringing was where the breakdowns part of it came from, as in not knowing I could prevent it until now. Well prevent it happening around anyone anyway.

The atmosphere in my family was real hell. Discord between my parents resulted in heated exchanges all day long. My father attacked me fiercely, as a kind of scapegoat. Even now I can't measure the horror I lived in. As soon as I was able, I fled the family and the city where I was grown. But it wasn't easy at all for me to earn a living. I would have been a good translator (incidentally I recommend very much translation work for autistics; it doesn't require sociality, bosses, colleagues). Often autistics are good at languages. I was good at languages and I translated nearly twenty book from English, before and after I entered in the university as an instructor in sociology. Teaching for me was an incommensurable stress. Moreover my father was a very well known an controversial figure, and, even after his death, it was difficult for me to cast off his shadow. For all this reasons I never got some form of self assurance. When you are the son of a famous person, this adds the difficulty of genuine relationships. Are they approaching you, or the son of Y? It was a constant and well founded doubt.
Survival, economic and psychological, was extremely difficult and I couldn't think of other reasons that those related to my family life. I became severely dependent on chemicals and alcohol and it was a miracle that I survived.
At that time there was no articulate understanding of the mind: Ronald Laing's the “Self divided”, was the best description of my condition. But the discarding of Freud was late to come. The change to cognitivism and modularity came in the nineties. Coupled with the confrontation with an autistic relative, I finally realized that it was as if all my life I had tried to be a cyclist without a limb. The only difference is that you cannot really hide that you are lame, while that you are devoid of the organs, or modules necessary to socialize, this you can try to hide, although with a tremendous effort. You may discover very late that your life has been pretence, acting: a nightmarish masquerade. If you have a good innate structure you may escape someway from your family, but if you can’t socialize you can’t find allies and viable acceptance outside your family. Being both my parents without real friends, very probably autistic themselves, there was not that enlargement of the family that usually lightens thing up and allows to find some allies and protection in the external human environment.