Defective Chromosomes?

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I've read many news articles about the recent finding that autism is formed by chromosomal "defects" (patterns of them--it's not just on one chromosome and the patterns differ for each individual.) I want to know why they are using the word "abnormalities" or "differences." Why do they think it is a defect?

E: double post

Last edited by MONKEY on 13 Jun 2010, 4:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because they technically are abnormalities. They are not what is typical in the human brain, so of course they will be called defects and stuff like that. Just because it is abnormal doesn't mean it's inferior, like that famous Hans Asperger quote "anything that steps out of line, thus abnormal, should not necessarily be inferior".
Just pointing out the fact that it is an abnormality and defect in the genes is not a bad thing, because to be honest the results of whatever's happening to the genes is kind of a defect, because it's not common and it causes a lot of hassle in that person's life.

Good point. People can have XX or XY chromosomes, yet neither set is considered defective while the other is considered normal.

I would guess the scientists studying the issue simply haven't thought about it (or been introduced to the idea that difference doesn't equal deficit). So they're just going along with the common social view. ASC's are listed in a book a with the word "Disorders" in it's title, after all.

I don't feel that there's anything defective about me. I feel that, I'm a very unique person, and once the world learns to embrace our uniqueness, they'll stop calling us, and our genes defective, and Autism Speaks will go under.

Different not less!

I have defective feet, but I'm not less of a person. Just because a gene is different and technically defective doesn't mean the person is. I'm sure if you combed through anybodies DNA or physiology you'd find a "defect." Even a dimple, as adorable as they are, is a defect in the facial muscle.

From what i read Autistics have rare deletions in the genes (which is apparently uncommon, usually the deletions don't happen with genes) AS WELL AS other genetic variations, ironically this is veiwed as an illness, when. scientist doing it purposefully (called Gene Knockout) discover that sometimes it can be beneficial or meaningless (Japanese study on the effects of arterial pressure in knock out mice concluded no effect and Bone marrow–specific Cap gene deletion protecting against high-fat diet–induced insulin resistance).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation

Unfortunately for us as other posters have pointed out the mainstream veiw is Disorder/defective, INSPITE of the difficulties being SOCIAL (occuring within a man made construct constructed by a group with substantially different cognitive function.), so till scientists decide to be impartial on this, the mutations that contribute to autism will be veiwed not as simply nature doing its thing by introducing variations (Which have been proven to be producing individuals FIT ENOUGH to be sexually selected apparently since man moved out of africa), but as genetic illness (due to its end result, not its methord/cause).

What I had understood from looking at the research (which I haven't looked at deeply yet) is that everybody has something in the order of 5000 deletions in their genetic material but in NTs the deletions occurs mainly in sections of the code that are "blank", that is, that don't actually code for anything (and no one knows why we have big blank sections in our dna in the first place.) I wonder if the "blank space" is a sort of buffer space because genetic mutation will occur -- it's one of the factors of natural selection, after all -- but if there are "too many" mutations at once, it's more difficult to predict whether an organism will survive or not. So there's a buffer zone to take the bulk of the mutations so that only a few will actually creep into the real code and have a chance of altering the species in one way or another.

Autistic people are just people who got a higher amount of the mutations in their functioning code. And that's why there are both benefits and drawbacks to being autistic, because the mutations are random and historically (in the grand sweep of human existence, that is) some mutations have been dead ends and some have moved the species forward. Since autistic people have so many more deletions in functioning code, it is only to be expected that they will get a little bit of both those conditions in their indvidual outcome.

In the strictest sense, these deletions are "errors" in the code. But one must never forget that it was an error in the code that changed us from what we were into what we are today. For example, the development of spoken language most likely depended on several "errors" in the code.