Digging up the root (cause)

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I was just having a somewhat thought about the "speciation" of AS... really it was a thought about Brassicas: kale, collards, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, romesco, cabbage, brussels, etc ... these are all the same species capable of reproducing with each other, yet radically different.

that led me to do a search on AS speciation withing wrongplanet, and I didn't find anything very meaningful beyond the darwinian "we can reproduce offspring with typicals that is capable of reproducing." Which, I must apologize, is not enough to satisfy my interest. Yes, kohlrabi can reproduce with collards, but i'd never dream of making "collards with oxtail," southern soul food, with kohlrabi instead of collards. So, kohlrabi is obviously and radically different from collards, but AS are not radically and obviously different from NTs.

Or are they?

About the "speciation" of AS... Oh, I'm not questioning the ability of Aspies to reproduce with the baseline... at least not on a physical level... it's just that, like the brassicae, humans seem to produce some rather fantastically different specimens with the same base of raw materials.

What is it that differentiates people? Culture, genes, the home environs in which they were raised?

With Autists, I keep seeing this seemingly random collection of "symptoms," and I can't stop wondering: "what is the common thread that makes one an Autist?"

The most I have been able to come up with is that Autists tend to think in non-verbal, direct sensual cognition. "Thinking in pictures" seems to be the most common, but I tend to think in touching and even smelling far more than seeing. Still, I think in "seeing" more than "wording," (which seems to be the typical human thought processing language.)

Or is it? Is wording just the most convenient method of human communication? I often feel like I "speak a different body language" from most people, but is that a cause or a symptom?

What I'm getting at is that everyone seems honed in on "what are the symptoms of autism?" It's a weird list of symptoms. Admit it. Some of the symptoms seem like absolute paradox with ech other. I am continually shocked that there is anyone out there who is apparently "just like me" in so many disparate, specific ways. But there are. Lots of you.

So what is the root? What is the common thread? Are we just collards to the world's broccoli? They are grown for displaying pretty words (flowers), and we for the raw senses (leaves, roots?) Is that the only real core difference? That our senses are more dominant (perhaps more acute as well, that's debatable), that we can't shut out or ignore or filter our senses quite as selectively as the baseliners?

Is that why we relate better to animals? Is that why we see the details that others miss? Is that why we have a harder time blocking people and events out, and they stress us out more?

The main difficulty with the idea is that, when you speak of "species", you are turning people into "others" who aren't like you. When we do that, we start excluding those "others,' whether we consciously want to or not, from thinking of them as being as much thinking, feeling people as ourselves.

Now I get what you're saying: you would like a way of classifying autists as a different breed of person from neurotypicals; we're all human and equal, just different. The problem is that there really isn't enough genetic difference among humans, even the most radically different from each other, to justify the existence of separate races, much less species.

I wish society would slow down enough so we could get to know each other and recognize the beauty of our differences along with just how similar we all are.

Thank you for addressing this issue, and poignantly. The only bone I have to pick is that you mention cultures as speciation level divergences in human variability. While cultures could be considered budding possibilities, they are only meme deep. Even the oldest continuing cultures are too young for their behaviors to have steered their genes very far. The only examples I can think of off the top of my head are digestive : people not of European descent are more likely to be lactose intolerant as adults; people of African descent (more recent african descent, since the human species originated from africa) are more likely to develop heart disease from high fat diets; Eskimos are basically immune to heart disease on the basis of fat consumption.

The 'speciation' of autism i think is much older than any culture. my theory is that autism produced the shaman. Shaman are the spiritual leaders of a tribe, but they also are the ones that maintain medical knowledge. They know which plants have what effects, and how to find them, and etcetera. Shaman are socially separated from the tribe, but they are referred to for their intellectual expertise. I must admit the theory is somewhat far fetched, in that it is pure speculation at this point. To give it more credibility you would have to visit shaman around the world, and attempt to determine if a considerable amount of them could be diagnosed with a 'disorder' on the spectrum.

And I am an anthropology major, so this is on my to do list.

Lucy, I don't feel that divergence of the species on a physical or cognitive level is in any way divisive, in and of itself. My best friend and life partner is a cat, and we are rather differently shaped and colored. I can believe him to be a person, but won't pretend tht he is a human. nd that makes it all the more beautiful, as you seem to agree.

But It does seem to me that "brain-wired-different" is as much a differentiation as "different physiognomy."

Accepting and embracing differences is not the same as pretending they don't exist. It's ok to recognize and classify them, no? It is the value judgement: "thinking in words is better," v "thinking in smells is better," which breeds the intolerance, yes?

...

So, subtly,
Are you familiar with Julian Jaynes "Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."? It is an interesting quasi scientific text associating the rise of human consciousness with the written language. As an anthropologist, I believe you might find it good reading. Jaynes postulates that modern day shamans are throwbacks to the sort of mindset that everyone had before rational literary consciousness and it's associated imagination became dominant.

But Jaynes deals more with schizophrenia: the "hearing-voices-as-primary-thought-process", as opposed to "thinking-in-pictures."

i think you're missing what he was saying a little bit. Using the term species is technically incorrect, but i think it was only used for lack of a better term. I cant think of one that fits real well. The array of cultivars all descended of wild cabbage are members of the same species. But they have specific peculiarities which breed true. But i think it would be to strange to use the word cultivars concerning humans.

Autists are admittedly as human as any human. But we have a laundry list of peculiarities which diverge from the norm, and we share with each other, and which we are likely to pass to our offspring, as we have inherited it from our ancestors. If you consider my speculations in my earlier post, whether they are technically correct, it does stand to reason that autism serves a function. Whatever genes that occasionally lead to the development of an autistic human, have been preserved for a reason.

It seems I have come across mention of that book at some point, but wrote it off for not being entirely scientifically accepted, however knowing we have a similarity in theories, it may be worth checking out. If at least for thought experiment.

I would have to disagree that the shaman/autist mindset was ever common. I think it serves its function very much because it is rare. We are able to see the world with different eyes, and impart a fraction of that sight for the benefit of the tribe. But a tribe full of shaman would be a disaster. Nothing would ever get done, and we'd go extinct.

Myself and at least a few other Aspies were obsessed with shamanism before we made this connection. If you watch the Autism Reality video [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLOCYubVc7g[/youtube] (if you haven't), there is an interview about 1:20 in with Dr. Hall, a shaman who claims that ASD gives one a right to practice shamanism in his traditional culture. I have a lot of ideas on this topic if you would like to discuss them further.

I would

It has looked to me like one of the common threads is the inability to filter - for information in nonverbal communication what is relevant and what is not, for sensory input what is background noise and what is not, and such.

Maybe autistics were the people who had to stay up at night, so the tribe wouldn't be eaten by hungry kitties. Those people would need to pick up on and not filter the sensory input.

Brilliant! So what characteristics fit the theory?

- attention to details = unable to think about the expected archetypes of objects, favoring instead the individual object before you (ie, seeing the "meta-object" instead of the "actual-object" in front of you.)

- lack of empathy = unable to filter part of face that is altered to convey emotion from the rest of facial characteristics?

- inability to hear someone talking to you = unable to filter voice out of mass of sounds?

- social akwardness = unable to filter people's presentation to find their hidden implications

- making gnarly faces = unable to filter one's facial muscles into socially accepted patterns that convey specific meaning

what else?

I can understand how creating subspecies of humans can make it more convenient for science and for addressing the issues unique to certain groups of people, but I can also see it being perverted into sociological ideas that fit what people want to believe at the moment. That sort of perversion seems to happen often, for example Darwinism and Social Darwinism.

It would be too easy for society to determine that Aspies and Auties are inherenttly unequal and that this is the reason they are so often unemployed or underemployed. People are inclined to believe this myth anyway; creating a separate classification may serve to strengthen this idea. I know it's not logical, but people generally aren't logical when it comes to matters of wealth and position.

I agree that autism and aspergers are an evolutionary adaptation; logical, systematic thinking is necessary in group survival and adaptation. I think that society would find itself becoming stagnant and technologically backwards if it bars its autistic and aspergers members from contributing.