Asperger's: Beneficial Mutation?

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No doubt this is correct, but that still flies in the face of the idea often pandered around this website that without AS technology would not be as advanced as it is. unless of course that 20% have all the break through's and the 80% with different neurology are just the research assistants an idea that is patently absurd.

The main reason for humanity swamping the planet has little to do with tech, the senses or strength, primarily it is our communal approach to survival. yes we invented tools, but a single spear would not take down a woolly mammoth or a large predator, but a group of people with many spears and as someone has already pointed out under good leadership will. AS folk do not work well in teams, in fact the opposite is true we piss people of. And as for the idea of a population dominated by AS oh my can you imagine the dysfunction!! !! !

The fact I hate children is probably the biggest!!

TF's point is quite valid though we have the ability to share knowledge and experience across the planet and ages in a way no other species can quite accomplish and as such someone even when sexually isolated might incur great change that in turn will live on as a genetic impact down the line, however indirect.

that has nothing to do with AS or asd's however, on that we agree.
as for teamwork, that depends on the people, there are people i work well with and people i dont, working in a new team and getting used to new people however.

Possible and plausible, but then there is also the controversial hypothesis of foetal origins, which may, suggest more than "simple" natural selection is at play.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2021065,00

I only caught this on the tv last night so I am on fairly shaky ground posting this. Any thoughts?

Well here we go,

Post apocolypse where I survived.. Lets see what benefits I have for the new world.. I avoid living people like the plague, most likely to live in a cave, wouldn't want to kill my food hand to hand unless no other option so would resort to trapping. If I did encounter other survivors they would probably try to kill me for all the resources I huddled together in said cave. Result, I would hate people even more then I do now and instead kill everyone on sight with no mercy, maybe eat them if hungry enough on a bad streak of trapping.

Besides hating everyone living on the earth at this point would have no want of co-populating for the human race as women are nothing but trouble really and ontop of this fear of intimacy/touching/whatever. So all in all I'd say its just a slow and painful life with an equally slow and painfull death waiting.

Yes, yes, I'm looking at negatives, there are benefits, bla bla bla, to understand something you must understand all aspects of it. Yes, I would be focused on where I live and my survival but that focus would be unwavering and would leave me closed off to new things (such as women possibly?). My alienation of people would influence my seperation from them, my burning hatred of everything authoritive would drive me to kill anyone who tries to command me. My love for the technical would give me the ability to rig magnificent traps (for animals or people ).

I do not believe Asperger's Syndrome is a beneficial genome or whatever you're proposing but I do enjoy being me. I do get lonely sometimes, and usually that results in bad attempts at connecting with another person, in which i'll see how shallow or simple they really are and just go back to the way things where and wipe them from my mind.

I contend that NTs are able to temporarily use "the independent mind" when under extreme stress.

We just exist in it continually.

Wide eyed, brain running full speed, senses intensified, and brutally logical.


we are/were shamans, wizards, scientists, witches.
"Good/White" if society finds you useful.
"Evil/Black" if they don't . . . resulting in torture and death.

Not an evolution or devolution.
*Law* is what we created to survive.
Logical rules.

While all humans are the same species, there are different versions, and due to the limitations of genetics, each version is on a seperate path.

Technology first appears in one very small group, less than a hundred, that goes on to become the ancestors of Europe, with a few splits along the way.

The main technology branch continues with small numbers, but the first level tech branch lives farther south and produces large populations.

All development terms such as stone age, copper age, are reports of the first appearance of a technology, but 10,000 years ago almost all of the planet was Paleolithic, unchanging old stone age.

While the inventors of a technology were few, so were the rest, but when the tech spread, field scale food production, domestic animals, population greatly increased with the spread.

While they became the majority of population, and are still the fastest breeders, it was based on unlimited food production.

Nigeria for example, they have a huge population for the size of the country, and are on track to out number the USA in fifty years, and become half the planet in a few hundred. South America and South Asia are also in the running for producing the next seven billion people, soon.

They have maxed out their food producing lands, food production per acre is falling worldwide, and all studies say there will be a forever water shortage in 2040.

The main technology line has grown slowly, Europe and North America are less than a half billion out of seven. A good deal of that population is from the first level tech people, who were breeders rather than developers.

A growing population was seen as wealth, more farm hands and troops, factory workers, tax payers, That model seems to have reached it's limits.

Up till a few hundred years ago 99% were involved in food production. It was the first thing automated. Then they moved to the cities and worked in factories, the next thing automated. Then they pushed paper in offices, until computers displaced them and paper.

As the Asperger Types are well represented in the automation, with more coming, it seems a new form of warfare, making large populations obsolete.Peak food production, oil,water, is going to send most back to the Paleolithic, where only a few can survive.

If in a hundred years there are One Billion people, and the Earth kept as a Park, this Technological Mutation could be said to work. Europe and North America should be about the same, lightly populated and productive.

Our plan of world conquest is working out just fine.

Well... in some tiny communities on earth there is evidence that -gasp !- THE GEEKS ARE BREEDING!

Ive heard that there is cluster of autism among children born in silicon valley. All the geeks are drawn together by the opportunity to be rewarded for their geekiness by the IT industry by moving to Silicon Valley ( or to its analogs in Europe, Japan, and China). The geeks meet and marry other geeks. Their spawn get a double dose of geek genes and you get a geographic spike in the number of children with autism.

So does this mean that a new kind of homo sapien is being fashioned in the silicon vallies of the world by this real life genetic expirament being unintensionally conducted by the IT industry? Does it mean that aspies will fan out from tiny points like silicon valley to take over the world?

I doubt it.

Autism is at best something like sickle cell anemia. A genetic handicap that genitically piggybacks onto other traits that can be strenghts ( but even then the traits that are strengths are strengths only in certain narrow situations). With sickle cell its the ability to resist malaria. With autism its a certain kind of brain thats wired in a way that can do whatever it is that IT people do- enough of the right kind of brain wiring you get a programing genius. Too much and you get a lowfunciong autie. So the IT industry my create a "selective force" that pulls together the few and far between geeks of the planet into communities - where they can meet and breed. So it might seem like geekiness will then take over but it wont work out that way. Its more complicated than that.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 31 May 2012, 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I contend that autism is *any* interruption in the end sequence of the DNA iterative protein program.
Autistic traits in families are those with "non-robust" genetics. It is a tendency not a specific genetic mutation.
Autism can be caused in those without the "trait genetics" through developmental stress.

So, weak genetics, high environmental stress = more autistics.
More and more and more.

The Spectrum could have an epigenetic origin.

ruveyn

This just begs the question which your brain running at full speed with brutal logic should be able to supply. EVIDENCE please

I've always thought that those of us with Aspergers were essentially the real X-Men - socially outcasts, but exceptional.

There are NT geniuses too. Richard Feynman was a NT and one of the greatest physicists of the 20 th century.

And there are a lot of Aspies who are duds at math or physics.

ruveyn