The possibility that autism is the human evolutionary past

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Good point. We think that the spectrum is part of the natural variation that biologists expect to occur in species. What we call lupinistic humans also vary widely in intelligence and other factors. We hypothesize that LFA is actually an anomaly, and that the vast majority of people on the spectrum are higher functioning. There is some evidence that this might be the case, as LFA has higher visibility so it was noticed first, but now psychologists are discovering more HFA as they look closer.

We think that in the ancestral autistic environment, there would be no impairment to speak of, since most impairment is from the viewpoint of today's dominant subspecies. If we were a species that was exploiting a systematizing, possibly semi-aquatic niche, then we can invoke the psychological concept of intelligence thresholds to say that LFA was probably good enough.

my take on the first part of the first post (labelled number 1 of "The Prior Dominance of Autism Hypothesis"):

1. there are multiple spelling errors in your paper. you need to sort that out if you want to be taken seriously as it is not excusable in a legitimate scientific paper.

2. if multiple genetic mutations that can happen to any member of the human population may cause autism (as one of the links in your paper suggests), then autistic people wouldn't qualify as a subspecies. a subspecies doesn't happen at random events across a larger population but would replicate itself mostly predictably within its own population. a subspecies is a population unto itself, not a difference within another population.

3. there is recent evidence to genetically link schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and ADHD with autism spectrum disorders, which would mean that autism is unlikely to have its own separate origins.
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/Autism/33589

4. you are approaching the subject with an "intelligent design" perspective, which is not quite scientific. from your paper:

I think this, and other possible hypotheses like it, might get a boost soon as the large empirical material from Aspie Quiz gets published. This paper is currently at peer-review again in a revision stage. Given the nature of the revisions, I find it quite likely that it will become accepted eventually.

After acceptance, the plan is to focus on a few more narrow areas (probably around ToM and communication), and submit new papers that disproves prevailing ideas about ToM and the nature of the communication-related problems, using Aspie Quiz' neurodiversity definition as a reference rather than DSM.

I'm calling bunk on this.

Chimpanzees, like us, are mostly non-autistic with a few autistics. Researchers have come up with a chimpanzee version of the Social Responsiveness Scale, a rating scale for autism in humans. It had good reliability and validity. When they reworded it to work with both humans and chimps, the chimp average was similar to the NT human average, and considerably lower than the autistic human average.

If there was a time in our past when autistics were the majority, it's before we diverged from chimps. My guess is it's when we diverged from orangutans, since they're the only solitary ape. (And they're about the furthest apes from us genetically.)

Now, where is your open mind Eric? The very fact that someone is brave enough to put their hypothesis out there, the very fact that they are trying to solve the great mystery that is autism, deserves respect, not shooting down in flames. Where is your proof that he is wrong? I'm not saying he's right either, but you can't just dismiss things out of hand because they are not peer-reviewed scientific papers every time. I thought us Aspies were supposed to be good at thinking outside of the box, pioneering, trail-blazing and such-like.

Woe betide he with a closed mind:

http://us.macmillan.com/greatdiscoverie ... eLlewellyn

i think that people with many different backgrounds can come up with scientific insight, but if a person wants to publish a credible hypothesis then they *might* need to have an educational background in order to have their ideas properly established and vetted. some people don't need to have that education in order to generate a hypothesis that makes scientific sense, whereas other people are missing too much knowledge to make scientific sense without the degrees.

for example, we have nuts like Jenny McCarthy pretty much making stuff up and she is able to get it published in non-scientific journals, but i don't think we should consider her credible as an actual scientist so she probably could do with some education. but there are isolated examples of rare modern scientists who were able to advance a field of study without having the expected education.

it can also depend on whether they want to be considered reputable in their field or not. people can self-publish but that won't usually get their ideas implemented as seamlessly into clinical practice or the general body of scientific knowledge.

the theory that this thread links to has enough errors that i would encourage the authors to seek further education or more detailed feedback from people in a scientific field. as it stands now, there are just too many holes in it for it to float, and if they better understood the concepts they are using in the paper they could see which direction they should go in.

i don't think that only people with degrees should be taken seriously when they are doing research or publishing hypotheses... as long as the research or information in it is scientifically sound.