Autism brought an advantage back in the day

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Advantages & Disadvantages, Intelligent & Unintelligent, Good & Evil, Moral & Immoral; the lens through which you view the world changes how those words are used. Justice is always victorious because justice is whatever the victor decides it is; evil is the losing side because they lost.

I have no idea what's advantageous or disadvantageous.

A salient point, IMO.

In my scheme of things, "advantageous," "good," and "moral" translate as "conducive to what I want." "Intelligent" means "able to achieve what I want." So if you know what you want, that's as near as you're going to get to knowing what's "advantageous." Another way of putting it is that "advantageous" is meaningless on its own, one needs to know what purpose or person the advantage is for, to make the assertion objective. Ditto for "good" (good for what / whom?), and "moral" is "in keeping with a particular, declared set of rules" (which rules one may or may not want). In the end, there is only wanting.

I disagree with the assessments of there being no good or evil, just want. There is the specific things that society says are good or evil, but that doesn't change what is or is not good or evil. Good builds people up, evil breaks people down. It's a matter of principle rather than specifics.

As for advantageous versus disadvantageous, it depends on context (advantageous to what?). With biological traits, it's using in reference to procreation, and whether something is advantageous or not depends on the environment and specific situation.

Somewhere, sometime, a primate ancestor picked up a rock and figured out "if I knocked bits of this that could be a useful tool.." and maybe that was one of us, though primal societies seem to demonstrate that co-operative collaboration was necessary to support day to day survival. Anyone who became sick or wounded would have utterly depended on the group for survival, and the isolated individual would have been at a tremendous disadvantage, sick or well. Daily life was reliant on the continuous provision of food, shelter, water, fire and interdependence. Group interdependence provided essential safety from marauders - whether these were large and savage animals or other hostile primate groups. Safety in numbers must have been the glue in those precursor societies, where survival was a one for all and all for one kind of enterprise. Co-operation equalled survival. Natural selection must surely have played a considerable part.

Amen!

I still think this idea is absurd. We don't even know if autism existed millennia ago.

Eh... whatever. Probably makes some people feel better. That's cool.

Unless humans were neurologically VERY different back then, there is no reason to assume it wouldn't have. In the very least the same mutations happening then would have still have happened then, so it might have been very rare, but it should have still existed. It probably wouldn't have manifested in quite the same way it does today due to differences in society, but we could probably take some caveman, move him to our modern society, and diagnose him as autistic.

That's just speculation, though. We don't know what even causes autism. It could very well be some mutation or environmental factor (or some combination thereof) that did not exist until more recently.

If we're just going to deal in speculation and "what if?", what we come up with isn't going to carry much weight.

We actually know SEVERAL things which cause autism, for example, Fragile X and tuberous sclerosis. There is no reason to believe those wouldn't have existed back in cave man times. The thing is, there is no single cause to autism, in most cases it's probably multiple things interacting together were no single one can be pointed to as being the cause. Beyond that trying to say what causes autism is like trying to say why some people are shy, there are so many factors it really isn't worth investigating.

Huh. Maybe I'm just misinformed or ignorant, then.

Or perhaps it's just that you want people to be built up and not broken down. So do I, I hasten to add, with the possible exception of people (I don't mean you) who seriously interfere with things or people I very strongly want protecting.

We agree completely on that, of course.

Yes I think that's the assumed qualification in most discussion of biological traits. Though I doubt that procreation as such is universally wanted. I don't seek to eradicate the terms "good" and "evil," I just find it more useful to peer further, and ask "who wants this?" because it makes it harder for those who disingenuously use such "absolutist" terms to manipulate my thinking. "Four legs good, two legs bad" would never work on me.

It has nothing to do with want, what it has to do with is evolution and what traits end up getting passed down. Has nothing to do with good or evil either.

Edit: something messed up the post earlier.

I agree. That's a very logical way of describing it.

Some other primates are similarly socially manipulative and status conscious as humans.

I would rather argue that the innate human instinct to collaborate and assist others, which has been experimentally verified in human babies, is perhaps a key feature that enables humans to counter-balance the competitive primate drive for social status with a capacity for impressive team work.

Another distinctive feature of humans appears to be the extent to which typical humans learn by imitation. This feature, in conjunction with human language and the related repertoire of human communication tools that assist cultural transmission (non verbal, writing, the telegraph, the internet, ...) make humans fairly unique. "Xerox copier" would be an appropriate nick name for typical humans. The human ability to imitate amplifies the goals that can be achieved via team work.

But team work and imitation are not enough to explain many of the inventions made by humans. You also need a few of those who subject beliefs to critical analysis, and who conduct experiments to either validate or dismiss the usefulness of specific beliefs. Those who conduct experiments are also the ones who are likely to stumble across interesting variations of cultural techniques. I think we know who these people are

Here is an excellent talk on the human creative process https://youtu.be/Ot1wztaqREw

Evolutionary advantages are more than that, For one, I have a advantage on exams, fore my autism strengthens my memory, and that my skills are better than anyone else in my grade.

In hunter-gatherer days, solitude meant almost certain death. It was also the punishment for any serious transgressions against society.