Are autistic people a new human species? (and more thoughts)

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Okay, hear me out, this is pretty long.

Being a high functioning Aspie myself, I've always felt like I didn't have much in common with other humans, and not in a narcissistic special snowflake sort of way. More in a "I just don't understand how other people communicate" sort of way, and because people have always told me I'm different or weird and treated me thus.

Over the roughly 26 years since I've been born, I've learned by trial and error what annoys "normal" people and what pleases them, but interacting with others is still a struggle and I face a lot of adversity.

Anyway, I was taking a walk from the grocery store to grab dinner, and there's this wetland between there and my house. I saw a salamander walking across the concrete path on the way home, and it got me thinking to how it's believed our evolutionary path started in the ocean and gradually reached dry land via estuary wetlands.

Over a long period of time, we evolved from salamander like animals into reptilians, and eventually became shrew-like types that evolved into the great apes.

I think Homo sapiens was essentially autistic relative to other apes, and that's why they developed language. If you look at our closest cousins the chimps and bonobos they have a great advantage over us in terms of physical strength and in terms of communicating with pheromones and body language, just like autistic people lack these abilities relative to neurotypical people. Due to the lack of GABA in people with autism they tend to have lower muscle tone, more introversion and more anxiety for the same reason drunks are more extroverted and carefree than sober people.

I think how Homo sapiens developed is these "unfit relatively autistic apes" started to develop higher intelligence to compensate for their shortcomings, and at one point or perhaps a few times independently they developed language. It was hard at first, their more jockish and social chimp and bonobo relatives looked down on them and abused and tormented them, but eventually realized that language was quite useful.

The more apes adopted language, the more advantageous these Homo sapien traits became, and their genes gradually became more fit than the genes of chimps and bonobos. Part of the reason for this is because language allowed them to transmit wisdom and tool-making knowledge to future generations - the beginning of culture. It was also the genesis of art, which creates feelings of kinship and camaraderie between groups.

It's been shown that the genes that help produce autism developed recently, after humans diverged from apes.

Fast forward much closer to our own time. In the Middle Ages and early modern times, and even in less developed places today like Africa, people were brutalized and killed for being "witches".

Witches seem to have a lot in common with autistic people. They twitch and seem to act oddly, they enjoy the company of cats, and have nerdy passions about specific things such as alchemy. They were falsely seen as being wicked, just like autistic people because of their high intelligence but difficulty at socializing and understanding other people's feelings. They also faced immense prejudice and tormenting from their peers.

If this sounds far fetched, autistic children in Cameroon today are often abused and murdered because people believe them to be witches.

Anyway, around the time the Renaissance happened you had people like Da Vinci, Newton and Galileo who seem to be what we would call Aspergers by today's standards. You also had the genesis of classical music. This is important because almost all autistic people seem drawn to music, and many musical prodigies are autistic. The Enlightenment was concurrent with the rise of classical music, as well as the French and American revolutions.

Around 1790 the telegraph is invented. It's widely known that hackers and engineers are prone to having autistic traits, and the telegraph and Morse Code are the direct ancestor of TCP/IP and the Internet.

Just like the earliest Homo sapiens invented language as a means to get around their relative handicap to the mainstream communication methods of hominids, the Internet and computers were largely created by people on the autistic spectrum to communicate their thoughts without being ridiculed and having to navigate protocols of body language and etiquette that make no sense to them. On the Internet you can be an entity of pure thought.

For the first 20 years or so that the Internet existed, most people didn't get it. It was also cumbersome to use, especially to a neurotypical.

Then in the late 1980s, a man named Tim Berners-Lee decides he needs to create a software interface to make the Internet more usable to "regular people". This happens at the same time hip hop, alternative music and post-rock are being pioneered by bands like Public Enemy, Talk Talk, Nirvana, the Beastie Boys, and Massive Attack. This is the same time rave music peaked and the USSR collapsed - the "Second Summer of Love". There is a dark side - the fall of communism allows for a lot of ugly old attitudes to rear their ugly heads again, but at the same time the Enlightenment is allowed to re-surface as there is no longer the Cold War fear.

This does not arise spontaneously of course but is largely influenced by older ideas such as jazz music and early ideas about hypermedia, going back as far as the Victorian era.

Within ten years, everybody is listening to this new music and is either using or at least aware of his new form of communication, the World Wide Web, which will make the transfer of culture, information and ideas magnitudes faster and easier than before it was widely accepted. The individualistic values of the Enlightenment become much closer to being fulfilled.

By the 2010s the Internet had spread through the whole world and to every class of person. This has created a situation of "information overload" for all Homo sapiens - a condition that people with autism experience naturally. The Internet is more or less a natural mycelium - an artificial fungal organism weaved largely by autistic people, that now connects the entire human race.

This brings to mind Terence McKenna's "stoned ape" theory that mushrooms were the genesis of human civilization, and autistic people seem more attracted to psychoactive substances, so it's possible that the earliest homo sapiens thought of language under the influence, just like drugs inspired Shakespeare, the hippie movement and the digital revolution.

The unintended result of the creation of the Internet and electronic media is that neurotypical people, due to being constantly overstimulated with information are becoming more and more similar to autistic people. This is why rates of autism seem to be climbing - it's not that it's necessarily becoming more genetically prevalent yet, it's just that the digital world autistic people created is starting to change people's minds and making autism more of a feature of positive genetic fitness.

This is why being a "nerd" went from being a reason to be assaulted and ridiculed just a few years ago to being something people actually want to emulate and admire.

I also think that the sudden recent acceptance of "queer" orientations is related as autistic people tend to be more "sapiosexual" than others and their attraction is not as dictated by physicality as neurotypical people. Even though I'm personally a straight man attracted to women, I find that gay people and autistic people have a lot in common and to some extent speak the "same language". For example we don't have an aversion to camp, and we tend to be more androgynous than straight neurotypicals. Autistic people live more in their minds, so in some cases one's biological sex is not as important.

The idea of autistic people being a burgeoning new species of human also explains why autistic people have a difficult time finding mates compared to others. Perhaps they are actually somewhat genetically incompatible with neurotypical people due to relatively novel mutations. It's been found that people with autism on average even look different from neurotypicals, for example having larger foreheads and somewhat shorter faces (on average, not always of course).

I personally think autism might be the missing link between humans and transhumans. It's pretty clear that we live in a transition between ages, and the planet itself is changing dramatically due to the rise of our intelligence.

It's pretty clear that we live in a transition between ages, a metaphorical "wetland" of sorts between the human and transhuman state - between the physical and platonic/digital world and the planet itself is changing dramatically due to the rise of our intelligence.

I personally don't think autistic people are fundamentally that different from NTs. We gossip, fight, worry, make mistakes, do everything NTs do. I think we are just human, only with some behaviours that are different from most people.

Autistics are Homo sapient sapiens, just like NTs.

I especially liked your theory on witches.

I think that it is definitely evolutionary. To go any further I feel would be jumping the gun.

However, I have also encountered what I call unconscious people who are aspies as well.

For some reason there are many connections (to view the world without a lens) that I feel some aspies are lacking, which I observe. Perhaps that is simply because I have more real world experience and my quest for truth comes from challenge and first hand experience.

But, in my opinion small talk and socialization beyond what is useful is a major waste of time and aspies seem to think more logically in general.

So, I'd say you very well be on to something in so far as evolution goes, however, not an entirely new species.

I always felt like this. that it might just be another species (agreeably more Intelligent).

No and No Autistic people have always been here just not recognized. The "where are all the old autistics" question is asked to prove Autism is a recent thing, to imply vaccines or evolution caused the "epidemic". Most autistics were institutionalized never to be heard from again, misdiagnosed or undiagnosed and muddled through as best as they could, if they could.

Aspergers genius idea is a myth. Aspergers is average to high intellengence with language skills by age 3. So it is the diagnostic criteria that make Aspies in general to be more intelligent then the general population not evolution. I have not heard of any increase in the amount of savants autistic and otherwise. 90 percent of us autistics are not savants. The stereotype hurts us in many ways. People think if we are not Rainman or Sheldon we can not be Aspies. People think we do not need acceptence or accomodations because geniuses can figure it out, people think we are not really autistic just special snowflakes who invented Aspergers as an excuse to be rude, lazy, and get underdeserved benifits. The very high intellegence Aspie stereotype has it roots in a decision made by Hans Asperger. Hans Asperger treated 200 autistics of all severity levels in his Vienna clinic. He ended up having bosses that were Nazi eugenisists that wanted to kill disabled people. In order to save thier lives he had to persuade them that autistics could be useful members of society so he used the examples of his 4 highest functioning patients.

The seeming acceptence of nerds etc is a result of media presence, TV characterizations etc. While that is a step, people bieng entertained by socially ackward geniuses does not equal them wanting to be friends or hire them. Just ask the person who is in jail for "driving while black" how well the popularity of black entertainers has helped them in real life. In the last few decades fear of thier office getting shot up, or bieng sued have made employers more reluctent to hire people who are different. And the success of the Donald Trump campaign suggests anything but acceptence of people who are different.

To imply that recent acceptence of gays is some is the result of evolution does a disservice to the decades and decades of hard work by LBGT activists who actually made it happen.

Your theory does not explain why, with all the information available on the web, people seem to use it mostly for watching videos of cats.

Most people with autism are physically indistinguishable from their non-autistic counterparts.

I feel that I can argue this. If it is genetic, then we can say that it is passed on. If people have exterminated those with this mutation, or whatever we will call it, then it would limit the occurence in future populations.

Therefore, with less barbaric times, it would emerge more prevalently. As far as I know modern science has no defined way evolution occurs, but simply theories of it occuring over generations. Now, when it comes to having a whole number, let us refer to a person, any person, as 1. Now, there are many fractions of one you can add to get the whole number. That is what I think, if it applies, an aspie is a 1, or a whole, but arranged differently with fractions of a different value in various areas. The point of evolution is to become more efficient overall and to perform specific functions, not necessarily to become a higher value number.

That's probably true. People with severe autism probably were dealt with severely in the old days.

Many people with Aspie/HFA characteristics , though, were seen as merely being eccentric. Sometimes, they were even given a grudging sort of respect, especially when the eccentricities benefitted the greater society in some way.

Within "primitive" societies, people of autistic/eccentric ilk might be thought of as having supernatural abilities. They might be shamans/witch doctors, etc.

I would purport that some of the cave artists had autistic tendencies, the same with those who were able to domesticate animals/create agriculture. They might have been seen as having special abilities, so they were exempt from the hunt to allow more free time to devise ways to improve the lot of the tribe/band.

It doesn't mean autistic people are evolutionarily advanced. It just means they are variations on the human theme.

"Are autistic people a new human species?"

A species, by definition, is a complete group of organisms that are able to procreate and reproduce within the group. Given that we can technically have children with people who are not autistic, no we are not a new species.

Of course they vary, but I have noticed that autistic people tend to have shorter faces/noses and larger/wider foreheads on average than NTs. Not always, but it's a common trend. Which is interesting because a lot of people think humans in the future will look something like Grey aliens.



It's not that simple. Dogs, wolves and coyotes are all different species, but not only can they interbreed, they can produce fertile offspring. I would argue autistic humans are a burgeoning subspecies at the very least.

Autism confers no evolutionary advantage.

- Autism Spectrum Disorders do not enhance one's chances for passing genes to the next generation; quite the opposite, in fact. Autistic people are known for being socially inept and unable to get dates.

- Autistic people are more often rejected for gainful employment than non-autistic people. Again, social ineptitude plays a big role in failure to find a job or get promoted. Having just one meltdown on the job can get a person fired.

- While the tendency for autism may run in families, it often correlates with ADD/ADHD, depressive disorders, and schizophrenia in the same families. Most people tend to avoid other people who show signs of being "crazy" (unless they are "crazy" themselves).

Once again, someone has proposed that people with autism are somehow the next step up in human evolution. Once again, social ineptness, clumsiness, and lack of verbal communication have been ignored in this latest "theory".

We are not a separate species. We are humans, albeit with divergent ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving the world.

We are not even a new subspecies. We are variants from what's "normal."

Actually, if our behavior revolves around tasks that involve technology, math, or any other career choice related to the advantages one with asperger's may have, then it is quite the contrary.

It is a myth that there is simply some preprogrammed code that places survival of the species first in evolution. No, I think it is based on how the species spends it's time. I think that of course survival and reproduction is a part of it, but what you are missing is that we have advantages in some areas over others.

The cause is our actions. The choice of partners with certain traits controls the evolutionary path. It is not simply, this makes us breed more, so this is how we will evolve.

Again, the theory of fractions of the whole applies here and when a person becomes specialized in an area it takes away from others, so that is sort of common sense.

Last edited by Torstin on 19 Dec 2015, 10:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

We have advantages. We have disadvantages.

To say that we are a new "evolved" variant of Homo sapiens sapiens is really stretching things, though.

We must live in complement with nonautistic people, not delude ourselves into thinking we are a superior variant to them. We must not think we are inferior to them, either.

And nonautistic people must live in complement with us.

If this were the state of affairs, the world would be a better place.