Does Autism/AS or an equivalent exist in non-human primates?

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Hi,

My name is Luke and I am new to this forum. I come from Liverpool, England and I was diagnosed with AS when I was 11 years old. Further information on me is found in my newbie post on the "Getting to know each other" forum.

I am just thinking about wether other species of animals can exhibit Autism/AS (or an equivalent). The reason for this is that in my opinion like that of many others both on the spectrum and off it is that Autistic Spectrum Disorders consist of innate traits which are gentically controlled (i.e. in your DNA) with some environment influance in certain circumstances and it therefore occurs naturally within the human population. Another trait that may have a genetic basis is homosexuality and we know that homosexual traits are exhibited by many other animal species including sheep, elephants, bison and non-human primates. So in my opinion autistic like traits may not be just confined to Homo Sapiens. In terms of looking for an equivalent outside of our own species I would think that Non - human primates in particular the Great Apes (common chimpanzee, bonobo chimpanzee, gorilla and orangatan) would be the first place to look considering that it is estimated the we share around 97% of our genetic material with the two species of chimpanzee and also the fact that these creatures share many of the same social structures and personality features as us and they also have large brains that could be vunerable to similar defects. I am wondering if thier have been any studies to the existance of autistic disorders in non human primates?

Luke

My dog is non-verbal. That's a sign of autism. He is autistic.

Hi. After reading your post I looked up "autism in apes" on Yahoo! Search. This is all I found:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Th ... 0340624973

I haven't read the book, and the summary is a bit unclear, so I'm not sure if it's relevant or not.

I have never heard of any studies being done on ASDs in non-human primates, but you bring up some good points. If they do have a genetic basis, who's to say they can't exist among our closest genetic relatives?

Considering that in the wild, the social group is essential for survival with gorillas, chimps and the like, I wonder if such individuals would survive very long...sad thought.

Uhm. I'm sure any autistic animal other than a human would likely not survive long.

i have seen a bird that plucked out all its feathers and a horse that chewed its tongue. so animals can definitely have psychological or neurological problems of some sort, and develop self-harming habits and / or stims.

I don't know about autism, but people have speculated about the usefulness of ADHD in other species: the ADHD deer keeps fidgeting, being distracted, looking up from its food, while the others in the herd are calmly just eating the grass, often oblivious to their surroundings. It is often the ADHD deer therefore that first notices the lion stalking in the bushes nearby - the ADHD deer impulsively darts away and the other deer notice this deer suddenly moving in their midst and get spooked and follow ... so the ADHD deer unintentionally keeps the rest of the herd safer.

I have no idea whether deer are like this in reality (the deer I know are uniformly erratic and nervous), but the principle seems mildly plausible - a herd benefits if some animals are easily-alarmed lookouts on behalf of the less vigilant majority.

Autism seems to come more into its own as a useful trait in advanced human societies: the mathematical and engineering skills, the very uneven abilities (resulting in highly specialised workers), the desire for solitude, etc are well suited in some ways to the modern electronic world.

There is a series of essays here that discuss autism in animals, responding to Temple Grandin's speculations about animal thought: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060042

and a different article about autism in animals here: http://a1harmony.com/6-animal-autism.htm

Those came from the first page of googling "autism in animal species" - there are probably more.

I have been thinking about this recently. Maybe in some ape groups you could get one that's a bit standoff-ish and doesn't like to hang around with the others, most likely at the bottom of the pecking order and gets picked on a lot. But I'm not sure about full-blown autism though. I think there is a possibilty of mental retardation in apes though or other neurological deficits. At the same time there could be gifted apes, what about that bonobo called Kanzi who can speak using symbols? Some of the things he does could be an indicator of genius in a non human animal.

No. All primates seem to dislike eye contact; regardless if they are "NT" or not. Whereass humans expect it. Autistic people are more simaliar to animals than NTs are. Just read Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation" and "Animals Make Us Human".

I am a primatologist with a focus on autism because of my own situation.

Autistic primates (both human and non-human) really do exist and are both equally good at the syntactic aspects of language (i.e. grammatical rules and other things that never change), not too good though at the pragmatic and non-verbal aspects (i.e. contextual sensitivity, finding the hidden message behind the obvious message, hand gestures, facial movements, melody of speech, etc.). Bonobos for example can be taught to actually speak English (although with a horrible accent . They also create idiosyncratic neologisms by themselves (comparable to what human autistic primates do).

(Non)-human neurotypical primates extensively use non-verbal communication, often comprising of very subtle and complicated facial and hand gestures. In human primates 70% of the actual communication takes place through non-verbal communication. So, although human neurotypical primates talk a lot, they really don't say much. The actual or real message can be read form their faces or their hands, so most of the time they don't really say what they actually mean in a verbatim way, which makes it difficult for us, autistic people. That way the mother almost immediately spots autistic infants.

According to recent figures the incidence ratio female/male with regard to autism is 1:10. So there are 10x more male autistic primates than female ones. Be careful though not to project every aspect of human neurology and psychology onto non-human primates. Non-human primate autism (NHPA) is therefore somewhat different from human primate autism (HPA).

Our ancestors show an evolutionary link to a mixed bonobo-chimp race (to keep it simple for now). Human primates have inherited (amongst other things) the sense of forgiveness of bonobos and both the brutality and empathy of chimps. Chimps can be very compassionate and let their autistic infant live, well protected from the sometimes gruesome aggression of dominant neurotypical males. But sometimes groups of well cooperating neurotypical chimps chase and hunt down individuals of their own kind, killing them and eating their raw flesh (these individuals may include autistic infants who can not withstand the sometimes overwhelming aggression of the neurotypical dominant majority). Sometimes a mother just leaves autistic infants behind to let it die of starvation as soon as she realizes that her child does not respond to her non-verbal signals the way she expects it to, understanding that the child will need constant protection and supervision within a group of dominant (aggressive) males.

Depending on their culture, non-human primates can be very tolerant and protective of their autistic infants, as is the case in human societies. There is even this well-known example of a gorilla mother protecting and saving a human child that had fallen into her enclosure at a zoo so that it could be rescued by her human counterparts.

Certain human societies can not tolerate the presence of autistic individuals because of superstitious believes or because of fear of the unknown (in certain African and Asian countries, autistic people are abandoned or euthanized). In China and Turkey autism is seen as a severe punishment for society where autistic people rarely survive or live in appalling conditions. That is reality. Funny to know that Einstein was autistic and that goes for many (usually male) artists and scientists.

Autistic primates (both human and non-human) are not anti-social as is often thought. The fact is that they are often left alone because the majority can not understand them so they become a threat to the "normal" neurotypical majority. Being alone doesn't necessarily mean that one enjoys or chooses this. To neurotypical people it is horrible to be alone and so there is this prejudice that autistic people must be very unhappy. Untrue! I prefer to have just a few well-known people around who WANT to understand me and who WANT to listen to what I really have to say. Quality means more to me than quantity.

It is also an often repeated prejudice (echolalia) that speech or intelligence have anything to do with autism. I didn't speak until a very late age and everyone thought I couldn't speak. The fact was however that I just refused to speak, although I was able to, because the neurotypical people around me simply did not understand me very well. Why speak when everyone is not really able to understand you? I didn't sense the importance of spoken language as did my NT peers, obviously. I still think that spoken language is a disease if you look at the fact that non-verbal communication is prevalent although not many people seem to be aware of this.

Another prejudice is that autistic people do not have sex but autistic primates still exist and because autism is genetically determined to a large extent, autistic primates must procreate, otherwise there wouldn't be any specimens left by now ...

We have a model of Rett syndrome in mice. The major observable part is the neurological deficits and movement disorders; but the Rett mice do have something that is very much like autism.

Video that shows physical differences between balance in Rett mice and normal mice:
http://www.dnatube.com/video/585/Rett-Syndrome-Mouse

(BTW, if you are worried they are picking the mice up by their tails--don't be; this is the normal, safe way to pick up a mouse. They are light enough that being held by their tails does not hurt them.)