What do you think causes Autism?

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I think there could be/are multiple causes.

I cannot see how neoteny alone could explain the whole autistic spectrum. IMHO, neoteny does not explain the spectrum any better than SBCs "extreme maleness", or assorted disorder theories from psychiatry.

Specifically, how do neoteny explain:
* Communication differences
* Social differences
* Perception differences
* Motor differences'

The first thing needing to be done before setting out to explain the cause of Autism is to split out the personality / odd preferences from the acquired traits (depression, low-self esteem, and possibly repetitive / restricted behaviors as well). It would also be needed to separate physical problems (heavy metals, dietary things) from personality-traits. Without doing this there is little chance of getting anywhere.

Last edited by rdos on 20 Nov 2009, 10:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Vaccines and uncaring mothers do, duh.

Seriously though, regarding the regression bit, I think that's because that age is when the differences between an autistic child and an NT child become apparent, not when they begin (although I have heard something about how the autistic brain begins developing differently around that age, can anyone elaborate on that for me?).

As yet, science has only succeeded in demonstrating that there is a preponderant genetic component to autism. Note that this does not mean that THERE IS or that THERE IS NOT also a trigger(s) involved. Also, even if a trigger(s) is not involved in causing autism, it is possible that certain factors might exacerbate/enhance the condition.

Thanks, fiddlerpianist, for the neoteny link. Fascinating site.

I personally believe there are multiple causes to autism, including a genetic predisposition, birth trauma and yes,in some cases, I believe explosure to certain chemicals triggers it. In the end, there have been some cases of diagnosed autistic children losing most of their autistic traits after specific treatment for excess of mercury, and I am not sure how to explain that other than that either it is just an elaborate exercise by the cure autism gang, or some kids with autism are afflicted not genetically, but from some reaction to chemicals. I watched a documentary on the mercury connection last night and the scientist father of an autistic girl had found some children lost their autistic symptoms with chelation therapy, but his daughter retained hers, which he explained away by saying she was too old and it was too late to help her. I just think there are multiple causes behind autism, and maybe it is possible that some diagnosed cases are not true autism in terms of being an incurable neurological disorder, but rather some sort of chemical reaction that might possibly be able to be undone. But, I still need to research more on this whole mercury link as I know it is very controversial and most scientists do not credit it at all.

I had a traumatic birth. My mother had an infection and I caught it, then had to be born by C section.

There are also spectrum traits, though less pronounced on both sides of my family.

I share this opinion.

I think that it's caused by excess testosterone in the mother's womb. In my case, it was. I'm the most mannish woman, here.

You make a good point with the oxygen-deprivation. I was premature, and had oxygen deprivation as well.

Eh? You obtained clear proof that correlates testosterone and your autism? I haven't heard of this before, have any credible studies been done on this possibility in particular? I only ask because it's very improbable that the cause of an individual's autism can be discovered with certainty.

I want to point out the possible ethical issues of reversing said chemical effects. You obviously know that the cure theory is extremely controversial, and I cannot say that the controversies would change for this possibility. Born with it or not, who is to say that - nevermind, I began digressing, I'll submit now, before I start a bitter debate

Certain forms of autism (Fragile X autism, for example) can have their cause known for certain. And, to answer another poster's point, that specific form of autism can be revered now via genetic therapy but it's experimental and genetic therapy has a track record of being a very dangerous method of doing things.

Most forms of autism can't be linked to any specific cause, though, you are absolutely correct there. Moreover, if I am correct in thinking autism is just a label given to a collection of (not necessarily connected) regions of a multi-dimensional mind-space and/or a vast combination of poorly-understood neurological variations, there is nothing there for "a cause" to have caused.

In the combination idea, again I point to the recipe for a cake. The presence of an egg or some flour doesn't mean a cake will occur. Indeed, even if all the ingredients are present, it still doesn't mean that. The ingredients have to happen in the right order and in the right quantity and be applied using the right method. If any of those is missing, you don't have a cake, you have something else. We don't know how complicated the recipe is for autism, or what variations of that recipe will produce the same result, so even if we knew all of the necessary pre-conditions were present for a form of autism, we'd still not know if those were the cause of a given person's autism.

I've never heard of testosterone causing autism. BUT autism is detected more often in boys than girls. (There's no proof it's more common in boys, because culture seriously screws things up.) A higher testosterone level could have made autism easier to detect, I'll buy that. IF, indeed, the incidence level is higher in boys, we have to be very careful. As I've noted elsewhere, the biological gender isn't the same as the brain's gender. They're developed by totally independent mechanisms. Is it the boy-brain that has the higher incidence, or the biological-boy that does? The two will be different, albeit not by a whole lot.

(What, nobody's studied that? Shock horror! Gasp!)

However, it gets more complex than that. Correlation doesn't prove causation. It might well be that elevated testosterone levels and/or the brain being a different gender have to do with something that produces autism, so that the testosterone didn't cause her autism but is a symptom of the underlying cause the same as the autism itself.

There are those with autism that come from families filled with lefthanders, often with other conditions like OCD, borderlines, narcissists and schizoids. Certain conditions seem to cluster.

What I'm playing with is humans 100,000 years ago or so were still situated in primary process state of mind. Primary process is one time, one place, no opposites. This is the language of the unconscious, very small children, dream, animals and the autistic. Today's autistic reveal features from three or four thousand generations ago, propelled backward by shifts in contemporary social structure, back to a matrifocal situation.

Baron-Cohen's studies supporting high testosterone women increasing the likelihood of autism fits into this theory that predicts changes in a mother's hormone levels will propel progeny backwards in ontological and species time.

Not all autism has these causes. Yet, today's neotenous, maturationally delayed males, and maturationally accelerated (non neotenous) females would be vulnerable to autism.

Because light in Northern latitudes forces fluctuation in testosterone levels, I predicted in 1998 that equatorial peoples immigrating to Northern climes would exhibit higher rates of autism. This year it was discovered that Somali's in Scandinavia and Minneapolis are exhibiting higher rates of autism.

There is an overriding logic, but it does not pretend to explain all autism. Just some.

Actually, we don't know that they start developing differently at that age; we only know that by that age, they are different. Before that, we'd have to MRI a few thousand presumably-typical infants and hope enough of them developed autistic traits later to know which group to check against the typical, and that's a large-scale study nobody's got the funding for yet.

I can certainly accept that, but would push the early human date back further. As archaeologists discover more about early humans (especially in the early British occupation, pre-Ice Age, and in the early South African occupation), they're finding evidence of astonishingly sophisticated cultures - well, sophisticated by the standard that they'd assumed, we would probably regard them as amazingly primitive by the standard of even modern-world stone-age tribes. By "astonishingly sophisticated", I'm not talking of anything as complex as a civilization but more of some of the building-blocks that are needed for civilizations to later be built. Distinct cultures, music, rituals, fixed ceremonial locations - these are now all in the 100,000 - 75,000 years ago timeframe.

It gets more complicated as chimpanzees exhibit awareness of past and future, of planning and anticipating, and of applying past experience to future events (something very young children don't do so well).

Now, I can certainly believe that autism (and, for that matter, OCD, synaesthesia, and a few other conditions) are fundamentally ancient in origin and have been perpetuated through genetics, but the evidence suggests that when we finally discover when the genetic element originated, we will all be very surprised. The only thing I think we can be certain of is that we're nowhere near as certain as we once were.

Having said that, I do honestly believe that humanity will fragment (as it has done many many times in the fossil record). One branch will be the neurotypicals, another branch will be the autistics, another will be the synaesthetes, etc. I believe this will happen once technology reaches the point where it can compensate for the disadvantages of any of these, so that the advantages of each can be used to full effect. Unlike earlier such splits, I don't see one branch surviving at the expense of the others, I see them all flourishing. Technology will reduce the need for them to stay as a single melting-pot.

This won't be the first time this has happened - proto-humans and proto-chimps remained as a single cosmopolitan community for a good million years or so after they became identifiably distinct before they became culturally distinct and then became actually distinct species. So clearly there's a massive overlap between the divergence fundamentally starting at the biological level and the divergence actually happening as far as the individuals are concerned. Evolution hasn't stopped since then (despite every effort by neurotypicals to make it), so the same pattern of events is inevitable.

However, autists as the prototype of Homo Superior Autistica (those of the next stage in human evolution whose autism is a notable point of their sub-species) and neurotypicals as the prototype of Homo Superior Normalis would seem to be really a new thread, so I would suggest that if anyone wants to continue on the futureward direction that such a thread be started. I don't want to start a new thread if I'd be the only one writing on it!