The possibility that autism is the human evolutionary past

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On behalf of my research group I am proud to announce a new hypothesis and set of research questions in regards to autism being the prior dominant brain wiring of Homo sapiens. To be clear, this is not yet a theory, only a hypothesis, however, we believe there is enough present evidence for this hypothesis to be strongly considered.

Most of us here on Wrong Planet believe that autism is a different way of being human. Our research group endeavors to show that not only is that true, but that we were the first way of being human.

Before presenting our hypothesis for peer review by a scientific authority, we submit it first to all of you. Your support, suggestions, and skepticism are all strongly encouraged.

We know that many of you are tired of hearing autism being constantly linked to everything, and that your jadedness will be hard to overcome. Just remember that you heard it here first, the glorious rapping of the messenger at your door.

http://gloriousrapping.typepad.com/the_ ... that_auti/

What's the name of this research group? Where does it get its support? Who are the researchers and what are their scientific credentials?

Not again Eric. Give the guy a break!

OP...this sounds a bit like the Neanderthal theory of autism?

It's no use digging into something in any detail unless there is something worth considering.

A casual look at the links makes me doubt that there is anything at all.

Last edited by eric76 on 19 Mar 2013, 7:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Had a quick scan of the link, noticed quite a few typos (my pet hate), and I don't like being thought of as a sub-species, as it implies inferiority.

I'm rather confused, what is the OP talking about?

Considering how many people seem to think evolution = improvement, being considered part of the "evolutionary past" probably falls somewhere between autism speaks videos and allegations that mass murderers had ASD on the scale of "good publicity".

That said, I personally find the neanderthal theory quite interesting.

One thing to remember about science is that it is very rare, if it is even possible, for scientific breakthroughs to be made by anyone other than experts in the field. You have to thoroughly understand the current theory to have any chance of improving upon it.

Whenever I see claims of major scientific breakthroughs, the first thing I want to see is the background of those making the supposed breakthroughs. If they are not experts in the field, they are going to have a very tough time convincing me that there is anything to their claims.

What we have here is some anonymous claims about some anonymous "research group". Furthermore, instead of presenting these claims to experts in the field, they are posted on a blog and then links to that blog are posted on sites that have nothing to do with it other than a loose connection related to the condition itself.

If this was real science, it is extremely unlikely that it would ever be disseminated in this manner.

In science, credentials really do matter -- they are a very reliable way to determine to whom one should pay attention and who can be safely ignored.

OP would care to remind eric76 that Einstein published the theory of relativity while he was a clerk at a patent office.

Albert Einstein was already expertly familiar with the current physics of the day and was a published author in prestigious physics journals. While he was young and with a fresh PhD, he was hardly some unknown with no credentials suddenly showing up the world of physics.

eric76 your skepticism is welcome, however, I would rather you would direct it at the content of the work. True scholarship cares about what is written, not who writes something. If you are willing to take more than a casual look and are confused about the hypothesis I will be willing to clarify anything for you.

To a degree it is true that scholarship is important. But how expert you are in the existing field is of vital importance. If you do not understand the current theories and what is right with them and what is wrong with them, you can hardly hope to improve upon them.

I will say this about the idea. During the roughly 100,000 year period of the last glaciation, I think that survival surely relied heavily on becoming productive at as early an age as possible. Any kind of developmental delay as is characteristic of Autism would hardly seem to be conducive to early productivity. I find it implausible that a species of Autistic people would be likely to survive.

eric76, to address your first point, our hypothesis addresses questions from numerous fields, such as evolutionary psychology, general psychology, abnormal psychology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, linguistics, etc. Now while there are certainly experts in all of these fields, no one person is an expert in ALL of them. Our research group feels that one reason this hypothesis has yet to be proposed is due to the highly specialized nature of graduate and postgraduate studies, in which many academics end up becoming laypeople in their own fields. We are trying to correct that tunnel vision by connecting different fields and utilizing multiple lines of evidence.

As to your second point, that is exactly what we are arguing. A new type of human emerged from those harsh conditions which absorbed autism into its gene pool. Autistic humans would not have survived except in the pockets of environmental stability which did exist, although we believe those autistic bands were eventually also absorbed. However, we question whether the developmental delay in autism is socially constructed. To the point, we feel it is only a delay from the point of view of what we call lupinistic development. We think that young autistic children almost immediately set about their niche construction, which involves making and learning to use tools. We think this is why they ignore people in favor of objects and why they stack and line up objects -- in the ancestral environment there wouldn't have been toys to stack up and stuffed animals to line up, but there would have been a lot of rocks, and the lithic industry was vital to the survival of early humans.

Interesting hypotheses, but a long way from a theory. Autism is a often a serious disability, not a different kind of human, and it is often caused by genetic mutation.

But ...will we get to call NTs Lupies?

Maybird, thank you for coining "lupies." Autism often appears as a serious disability because we live in a lupinistic world. We are arguing that autism is a species trying to construct a niche, just as every other species does, and often that niche goes unconstructed, which is why we reference alienation. If we lived in an autistically dominant world, lupinistic children would probably be labeled as having a serious disability.

It is caused by genetic mutations, but by as many as one thousand of them, making it by far the strongest polygenic disorder. We question at what point you say a genetic mutation causes something and at what point you can say a genome of a species is showing through.

When I said serious disability, I was mainly referencing LFA. How can autism be a species if it is a spectrum of disabilities from severely impaired to mildly impaired, even if mildly impaired people would not be so impaired in an autistic culture?