Asperger's: Beneficial Mutation?

Post Reply New Topic

Thank you langers, this is what I was trying to say but you put it in a more decipherable format for everyone

If I correctly understand what you saying... That Facebook has made/is making face-to-face human interactions redundant?

Is that supposed to be a joke?

At the end of the day, everything that happens in "real world" happens in the street, technology is and will always remain to be peripheral. It exists to make our lives easier.

Only a tiny minority of people can actually work without face-to-face interaction, currently mainly programmers. Others only use computers to improve productivity, rather than to supplement all interactions.



Yes, tell that to the people posting in the Love and Dating selection of this board. I doubt the majority will agree with you.

The concept of arranged marriages theoretically improves everyone's chance of mating.

The logic you used can also be applied to gays and lesbians. Does that help purity and provide "specialist tendencies"?

Also, aren't people with AS more likely to have children with (lower functioning) autism? Is that also a beneficial purity and "specialist tendencies"?

You also missed something else, you say we are likely to find a mate similar to ourselves, but that isn't possible if you believe statics.
As the AS male to female ratio is ~4:1.
Which also makes me think that the reality you see from a female perspective may be very different than that of a male's.

She implies that aspies have an advantage because the modern world offers and alternative to face-to-face socialisation through technology. In any disaster scenario, infrastructure which not be around for "technology" to work.
Hence the "advantage" would be for nought.

Well I see an advantage too... maybe not necessarily in a disaster scenario... but considering that many individuals who suffer of AS have social difficulties, technology can be a 'godsend' in terms of forming relationships. Once again, there are many factors that work against the whole benefit factor though, such as what you said, the male to female ratio of individuals who suffer of AS.

I am starting to ask myself if this topic is veering off course.

Honestly, this is not within my area of interest, but the strawmanning you used here is so infuriatingly obvious it demands a proper address.

She's talking about a shift from an offlline medium of communication to an online one, not that the online one has already replaced the offline one. Information that needs to be passed in the past has gone from purely face-to-face, to over the phone, to over the internet, and in every stage of this progression, a lot of social cues NTs traditionally rely on have been eliminated.

As a result, NTs who use the Internet extensively enough to communicate will experience a shift towards a more AS-type communication style (more direct, less implied cues), which will make it easier for us to understand them, and less likely for them to misunderstand us.

I fail to notice a single instance in which langers used an absolute term like "replaced", "redundant", "all", and fail to notice a sentence in which you do not.



The logic used cannot be applied to gays and lesbians. It is only applicable to traits that can be genetically passed down, and homosexuality is by definition not a trait that can be passed down with our current level of reproductive technology. To draw a parallel to your homosexuality argument would be to say that if two people who like to talk about flowers marry, their children will like to talk about flowers.

In contrast, while the genetic cause of AS has not yet been exactly determined, it is statistically correlated that being related by blood to someone with AS will increase the chance of a said person to have AS himself/herself, as much as one for whom one's family members has contracted cancer is more likely to get it oneself.

In ignoring the difference between a heritable trait and a non-heritable trait, you have made an unreasonable analogy to her argument.

Regardless of the strength of your beliefs and/or the strengths of your beliefs, straw manning someone is uncalled for.

As an aside, arranged marriages don't improve the chances of everyone mating. There will be people whose family circumstances are such that they may be similarly unmarriageable. Arranged marriages simply shift the criteria for marriage from personal criteria to group criteria, of which wealth and social status are especially prevalent. In the context of AS we would only be more likely to marry when marriages are arranged if the social criteria used to determine marriagability in that context favour our group, say, rational ability. If the criteria used are such as social rank and wealth, we may be equally as unlikely, or perhaps even more so, to marry than at present.

The ratio as well as the general increased tolerance by males to females' deviance relative to females' tolerance to males' deviance in modern westernised society create a situation in which aspie females are marginally more reproductively successful than aspie males, but this situation is reversed in highly patriarchal societies (generally the less economically developed ones).

While there is a difference between the picture an Aspie female will see and an Aspie male will see, there is an even greater difference between what someone who bothers to understand will see and what someone who glances through and jumps to conclusions will see.

Yep I am sorry MadnessMaddened, even though I do see the flaws in this idea that AS may be a beneficial mutation, I strongly agree with Twilightflame. WP may be "just another online site" but I expect more from WP members as opposed to lets say YouTube users.

"The disaster scenario" is a red herring. We're done with that subject. Neurotypicality evolved in the stone age. So a return to the stone age would favor neurotypicality.

Langers approach makes sense in general kind of way; in that its the type of thing to look for if you wanna speculate about a future evolutionary spread of as.

Not a return to a dark age but something new in the future ( a new technolgoy, or type of economy, or the latter caused by the former) would come along that would put normal folks at a disadvantage and put aspies at an advantage.

It might evolve out of the new media we are seeing today.

About the specifics of what she saying - that internet socializing actually puts nts at an actual disadvantage, as well aiding abetting aspies finding mates.and so forth. I dunno. Ill have to get back to you about that. ( as Sarah Palin would say).

I do have some sympathy for the guy who pointed out the women aspes have it easier than the guys in finding a mate (aspie, or nt).

Buy the way there are two issues with the female vs male aspie thing I think are important to bring up. First of all there is strong evidence that there is a 1:2 ratio of female to male aspies, if you read the literature you will find that females are simply better, in a broad sense, in HIDING their symptoms there by running the risk of never being diagnosed. It may well be that the ratio is 1:1 and males just act out more and there by receive the attention that gets them a diagnosis and females are expected to be shy so, an odd-ball super shy girl slides by undetected. This is exactly what happened to me and I am not very mild in fact I (now knowing what I do) find it unbelievably impossible that I was not diagnosed till adulthood. I stimmed,NEVER touched other people, never looked at others, NEVER had friends, had special interests that consumed my life, have sensory issues, am a nightmare in social situations (completely emotion blind) etc... after hearing about AS my Mom said that that is exactly who I was and still am, an yet NO professional picked up on any of this because I am a girl (the stats. say there is a 1:4 ratio so most professional cross AS right off the list for girls and don't even consider it an option). So this idea that there are more male aspies then females is seriously questionable. There is strong bias so the stats. are unreliable.

Second of all the idea that it is easier for females with AS then males, in my opinion, is BS, my husband is an aspie in denial and it is far easier in his daily life then it is for me, first of all men are much more tolerant of others (women are very picky and pretty much the epiphany of NTs) My husband can behave in the exact same way that I do but it doesn't bother anybody, but the same words or actions from me are seen as deliberate and insulting!! !! !! !! The only reason that it may be easier for female aspies to find a mate is that in our culture it is the norm for the male to initiate the relationship, but this is also not true, the studies in human courting behavior have found that it is the females initial eye contact that invites the male invitation. If you don't believe that just sit and watch some NT courting behavior in a bar some time!! The only real advantage that female aspies have is our ability to mimic and there by go under the radar and live normal albeit VERY FAKE lives. Otherwise my other points were mulled over and digested and even though someone initially misinterpreted the points it was well clarified by others.

Also, having a mate with AS does not double the ASness of the children produced (that was such a ridiculous thought) although it does pass down the traits in a hire percentage. NOT in a higher percentage in the individual (this is like saying that two diabetics will produce a child who is twice as diabetic as the parents and if that child married a person like themselves their children would be four times as diabetic as the grandparents.) instead the child will only receive two alleles, one from each parent and the dominant allele will produce the phenotype (in a very simplistic sense) so that the child could not really be any more AS then their parents, unless by unfortunate allele alinement or mutation, which happens in NTs all the time, not all children are born perfect no matter how perfect the parents are. What I meen by a higher percentage that the chance of the children being like the mom and dad is higher, so an aspie mom and dad may have a 50% chance of having aspie children and a NT family may only have a 1% chance of having aspie children.

As far as tech helping aspies communicate, I talk to (or communicate) with far more people and in far more depth online, in forums like this one then I do or can in "real" life. How about you?

Both aspies and NTs spend boatloads of time on the web socializing.

I do talk to more people on line than I did pre internet times.

Havent meet anyone to go out with though.

Not so far.

It may improve my "reproductive" potential yet, or not.

Actually I did meet a fascinating person of the opposite sex ( a fellow aspie) whom I never wouldve met in non virtual life. The bad news is that I met a fascinationg .....ditto.
The reason we would never have met is because she lives on another continent.,

We had a lively correspondence as friends but she didnt live in my county so I couldnt casually ask her out to the movies or such. The relationship got strained and finnaly ended. Im still recovering from the heart ache. Might write her again just as a friend.

Yeh, love bites. It sure as heck is never convenient no matter who you are.

On the topic of beneficial mutation I had an argument about this very thing a few years back around a camp-fire. (which if people think I am rude here, they haven't seen nothing) The person who I was having the discussion/debate with was actually a doctor who lives across the street from me, I never told him I have AS and I never will now. His stand was that autism is a disability and we are ret*d and could never care for ourselves, we would never survive without a care taker and we have nothing to contribute to society. OBVIOUSLY I had a thing or two to tell him and the discussion ended when HE said, I said, "me and my husband" when I should have said "My husband and I" this was how he proved that I had nothing of substance to give to the argument because, how could I know Anything if I could not even use proper grammar. I had been about to tell him that my husband and I have AS and we get by just fine. Interesting how a doctor felt about this, huh?

The part about interrupting you before you got a word in edgewise because of you imperfect grammar is nasty.

He is rude.
If fact if hes that lacking in socially skills -it makes you wonder if he isnt an aspie himself!

The other stuff is the just typical obtuseness and ignorance you find in society. I went to a shrink for years who never even heard of the word 'aspergers". Your doctor nieghbor probably never did either.

What your nieghbor said is atleast half true ( thought if hes a doctor youd think hed know both halves of the truth).

What most folks call 'autistic' are low functioning autistics like the rainman - they may not be the same as ret*d but they might as well be. Not everyone knows the fine points- that there are high functioning autistics- and that aspergers is (this year) lumped with autism spectrum ( and next year its seperate, and the year after that they are totally merged together with HFA and the label gets dropped or whatever). Im not totally up on it myself.

When I applied for state help in vocational counsulling a few years ago the internal form (not for prospective employers) listed me as "austistic and ret*d". I demanded they remove tthe second adjective, but learned that in maryland you cant have one without the other- they go together ( "you get more help that way so go with it" ).

So In the world of the maryland Department of Occupational Rehabitlitation I have to be resigned to being both a member of Mensa and "ret*d" at the same time!

Go figure.

I'd say it isn't. Socialization is key to survival in a non-tech environment (pre-technology societies) and we're kind of F'd up in that area.

In a tech environment... if you're suggesting this is a recent development... I'd still say it is not.

In your scenario of a disaster it is not the intellectuals that survive but those who can get along and work together. We're rather handicapped in that regard.

Think of it this way: If anything, we'd be considered specialists. Specialists require support from the group to be able to perform their task. AKA the engineer cant be 'engineering' if he's too busy hunting for food and getting his own water, etc. Specialists are valuable but always are outnumbered. When others outnumber you it means they out-breed you (in evolutionary terms).

Social States eliminate the natural selection. Low IQs will reproduce themselves much more frequently than high IQs. And sometimes a low IQ family will give birth to a higher IQ child. I think our society doesn't allow the natural evolution via natural selection to go on any more. It's in a balance with a light inflation. But today there is another kind of evolution, the social/scientific evolution which has nothing to do with dna. It rises much faster than the genetical one and has much bigger influence on our lifes. I hope soon the genetical research will be able and allowed to manipulate humans dna to make them match to our future needs quicklier than in the course of thousands of years.

but why should aspergians be that much better than NTs? I believe that a very intelligent aspergian is more worth than a very intelligent NT since he has much more liberties in thinking but a stupid aspergian is maybe even worse than a stupid NT since normal plebs have at least their natural drives and so on to survive and reproduce themselves. don't you think?

I thought of aspergers as maybe being a beneficial mutation when I first heard this line in X-men

But all fiction aside I like the idea of being different and being proud of it because if I was not different life would just be boring. Mutant and proud.

I am currently struggling to imagine Patrick Stewart using the word "groovy".