Is Asperger's Evolution in Process?

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But in a world where certain areas are overpopulated, would we need to reproduce as much?

You don't need to die to be weeded out of the gene pool. If you never have kids, you could live to 110 and still not pass on your genes.

'Childfree' people are also selected against. As are people who are infertile, and people unable or unwilling to attract a mate of the opposite gender. (Although the last two are getting to be less sure with the advent of fertility treatments such as artificial insemination.) In addition, if you adopt children instead of producing your own, it's not your genes but the biological parents' that get passed down.

If you think your life is bad is bad with NTs, imagine your life without them. "Normal" people provide a "safety net" and a structure for people with disabilities - it sounds harsh but that's the fact.
It takes more than engineering skills and science to build a city. It takes people with skills of all sorts and people who can organize it all. Aspies have low social drive -actually a low drive to do stuff in general. Sure we're resourceful and knowledgeable in our field, but theres nothing to "glue" us together. Like Nts have a natural drive to gather,share and organize. We'd probably wander off and get eaten by predators.

That's not the point. Unless your autism is allowing you to pass on your own genes or assist your family in passing on their genes, it won't have an effect on the population at large.

Firstly, there are some sociable AS people. AS means difficulty relating socially to NTs, not lack of interest in social interaction.

And if you look across the animal kingdom, sociability is not always selected for. There are some highly successful species who have no drive to interact socially with anyone other than their own dependent offspring. In terms of avoiding predators, you can go for several possible options:

a) be social and hope the group can protect you

b) be solitary and very sneaky, and hope no one notices you (a group gets noticed)

c) be so dangerous nothing wants to bother you (which often impedes socialization because aggressiveness gets expressed against conspecifics as well as predators).

So, for example, on the Serengeti, wildebeest chose option a), dik dik chose option b), and honey badgers chose option c).

I do think interacting with other living beings predisposes to evolving intelligence, but they don't have to be your own species. Leopards, for example, are solitary hunters who are incredibly clever at outwitting their prey. They show fairly diverse hunting strategies (meaning it's not just instinct) and are the most successful of the big cats. For example, while they usually stalk and ambush, on dark moonless nights they'll do scare tactics where they deliberately announce their presence to prey who can't see, so that their panic will result in them doing something stupid like falling out of a tree. Leopards often use different strategies for different kinds of prey, and hunt a very wide variety of creatures.

obviously all that too. I was giving the reader digest condensed version of darwin for brevity's sake.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 22 Feb 2013, 7:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

One word: No.

As someone with an interest in biology and genetics, I think this could become an irrelevant question. Evolution is influenced by stresses, but technology has been removing stresses. Given enough time, we could develop a better understanding of our own genetics. I think that it's only a matter of time before we can rewrite our own genomes to suit our preferences. We will be able to sidestep evolution and raise questions on what it means to be human as we become things wholly strange and new.

Just playing devil's advocate here, because I'm interested in all sides of the debate.

1. Who is to say so? No-one has proof of 'who' or what created the universe and its contents, so maybe there is a goal to it all.

2. Is there proof of this though? Or is this anecdotal based on the fact that we have socialising issues etc.? Myself and my two daughters are on the spectrum. I have an acquaintance who I am sure is on the spectrum, she has three daughters who I am also sure are on the spectrum. They all have really obvious traits. Perhaps also, more females are getting it now because if more males had it and traditionally it's the male who approaches the female that would give a statistically lower chance of reproduction, so nature is adapting by bringing forth more females with ASCs.

3. As we don't have long enough studies on how long autism has been around, much less know the causes of it, it's hard to say that it's geared towards the community as a whole. For every action there is a reaction. So, this could be evolution's reaction to our unnatural way of living. It could be nature's answer to overpopulation, it could be a way of evolving the human race because we no longer need all the instincts we used to.

That's a good one!! Technology removing stresses!!

It's only changing stresses. Which is enough to alter an evolutionary path, granted.

I think people could be a good THOUSAND years away from having the kind of understanding necessary to write the genome on a gnat. Sure we will develop the ability to manipulate genes to a degree, but the consequences and recovery from the fallout will take a tick longer.
The people who acquire power are the ones who put money and self first. These are not qualities that are the foundations of a strong, wise, stable society that can make good decisions about things such as manipulating the human genome. We can't control our population, can't feed the people we have, can't go a single year without a war, and can't even protect our own environment from our own destruction.
Our technology has only been around for .00000002 % of the history of this planet or so, depending on how you define it, and only .0001% of the history of our species.
What mental capacities have we 'evolved' to go with it?

I simply do not believe that having the ability to do something like that is the same as having the right or the wisdom to do it. Like a chimpanzee with a loaded gun.

That autism per se is the 'next step in evolution' seems absurd because it doesnt appear to have any adaptive advantage in reproduction- that is autistics dont spawn more progeny per capita who in turn spawn more... causing their kind to increase as a proportion of the population with each generation. Autistics tend to be reproductive dead ends.

However- autism MIGHT concievable be a byproduct or side effect of somekind of postive evolutionary adaptation to civilization.

There are signs that our evolution didnt stop in the ice age, but continued in the short 5000 years of civilization.

Perhaps as literacy and education became more important to survival in the last few centuries that has created selective pressure on parts of the brain that are involved in processing abastract symobols- and that causes an increase in the number of autistic children born. An analogy would be sickle cell anemia. SCA obvious is maladaptive, but it occurs in populations assulted by malaria for dozens of generations- who have been forced to evolve resistence to malaria. The side effect of having alot people who can resist malaria is that you also get alot of people with sickle cell anemia. Might be something like that.
Just throwing that out as a possibliity.

I actually was thinking along similar lines. If there is a genetic element, coupled with the kinds of changes that our society has undergone, then maybe it is an adaptation of sorts.
The fact that autistics are less likely to reproduce does not rule it out. Fertility issues are becoming more prevalent in technological societies anyway, and autistics are just as prone to many other conditions as anyone else. Maybe if our society was more accommodating toward autistics then we would eventually see comparative reproduction rates become more similar.

AS doesn't mean "has difficulty socialising with NTs", it means "has difficulty socialising". From experience, attempts at socialising between two Aspies go worse than interactions between an Aspie and an NT. Neither of you is giving the signals or doing the legwork in the conversation.
A good analogy is a conversation between an American and a Chinese person- the American theoretically speaks perfect English, so the Chinese person just has to translate that into Mandarin. However, if a Frenchman meets a Chinese person, chances are neither speaks the other's language, so the French person speaks in bad English to the Chinese person, who translates as best he can into Mandarin, then speaks in bad English to the French person...

Humans are not leopards or wildebeest or honey badgers. Humans are adapted to work together and communicate. Specifically, our mating rituals revolve around communication. If Aspies have the same fertility rates as NTs then I will be gobsmacked, even the most high functioning Aspies will find it more difficult than most NTs to find a mate and many low functioning autistics will just be instantly disregarded as potential mates by most people.

Besides which, humans have generally shown to be more successful when working in teams than alone. The most successful businesses in the world have large numbers of employees rather than being one guy in his garage.

food that is indigestible to me. there is some sort of mystique about AS that has evolved. and as a result there is a migration of pimply faced youths who declare that they have AS as a kind of membership to a club that they consider to be more evolved than average people.

i am sick of this site because it is infested with teenagers who idolise what they think AS is all about, and they self diagnose themselves and attempt to substantiate it with with feeble contrivances of their supposed life experiences that are formulated using the diagnostic criteria in order to make up things that augment their credibility.

they think that AS means genius and modesty and peacefulness and unawareness of their "superiority", yet "superiority" is hinted at in most of their sentiments that they try to pretend that they innocently and obliviously submit.

in the last ten years, i have gone from being an "interesting person" on AS sites who others were interested to listen to the thoughts of, to being a redundant artifact who is ignored by young people who have hijacked the syndrome and who have self diagnosed themselves as AS, and they then posit themselves as authorities as to what AS really is, even though they were never professionally diagnosed.

even the suggestion that they are not professionally diagnosed is met with derision and hostility, as they claim that professional diagnosticians are not qualified to dispute their self diagnoses.

before AS was a "fad", i was told that 1 in 166 people were autistic, and of those autistic people, only 1-2 percent had an IQ above average which suggested that one in 16 thousand people had AS.

but now every man and his dog claims to have asperger syndrome.

they self diagnose and they try to authoritatively redefine what asperger syndrome is according to their own personalities.

i have read posts that claim that people with AS have more empathy than those who do not have AS because the authors of those posts selectively discount the research of professionals, and substitute their own layman ideas.

i have read posts that discount that sensory issues that are a hallmark of AS are valid because they do not have sensory issues, but they still firmly believe they have AS.

the plethora of threads where sexually deprived males who state they want only AS females as girlfriends shows that AS is a fad
and they idealise AS as a "cool" way to be.

threads where the theme is that AS people are like children and everyone lies that they are asked for ID even when they are 50 years old shows that there is a very attractive notion about AS, and it has been stylized into something that attracts millions of young people to adopt as their own identity.

those millions of self diagnosed AS people contain very loud people who would tell me i am not AS because i am not like them.

some threads say that AS people are the life of parties, and others say that they have hundreds of friends, and they therefore conclude that friendlessness is not a factor of AS, but just a factor of a sh***y personality.


i was extensively studied and there are very few people like me, but my domain i feel has been gatecrashed by teenagers who wish to display like a peacock their personalities and they ascribe themselves as AS, and because i am so dissimilar to them, then i am told by them i am not AS but just mentally or socially ret*d, and they are bolstered by their fans who agree.

i do not really care that much , but the only reason i care is because my voice is lost on this site in the winds of young people's ideas who have redefined what the common belief of what AS is.

I have been checking out this site for a little over a week now and have noticed MUCH of what you describe. I see a lot of self-diagnosis and vague wikipedia assumptions about what AS is. I never knew it was cool. In fact, I'm still very much in the embarrassment stage about it -- even though I am beginning to embrace who I am and what I am. It's not cool. I wouldn't change it (especially since I've been living with it unknowingly for so long) -- but it has made my life extremely miserable at points and it makes each and every day a challenge. What is cool about that? AS does not mean genius or savant, as some people on this site seem to think (I saw a post just the other day from a self described "possible savant" who made some wild unsubstantiated and undocumented claims about his/her intelligence).

There are indeed a lot of fakers or posers or whatever muddying up the help and support some of us diagnosed folks need...

I've lost my train of thought...

I guess this has just been a longwinded THIS...

Hmm. Not going to take that personally because I am not a teenager, I am not self diagnosed, and I do not think I am superior. I just felt like having a discussion about evolution with no motive.
Just good chat with people that may be like me. 'Tis all, Sack. I am not aware of the fad because I've only recently discovered what Aspergers is. I'm still learning, which is another reason why I am here.

Sorry our discussion has angered you, my friend, but I personally find the different points of view interesting. *shrugs*