Scholars or pedants. What are autistics more likely to be?

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In a science book I'm reading about the history of life on Earth before the first appearance of homo sapiens , the author distinguishes between scholarship and pedantry.

He writes:

I think what the author is talking about there, is the type of person who becomes such a self-appointed expert in his field, that as new information comes in, he refuses to adapt his old notions to accept the new data. The old fashioned "If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings" sort of physicist.

I've read that it takes a full generation among scientists of any field for any radical new theoretical model to be fully accepted, because the existing school of pedantry has to literally die off in order before the stubborn refusal to even look at new ideas can be overcome.

Aspies have issues with sudden change in their social environment, but I don't know that that would make them any more or less resistant to new ideas in their fields of interest than anyone else. I'm always interested in hearing new ideas and possibilities in a field that fascinates me, but ultimately they have to pass the BS test.

Both. Einstein himself is a good example. In his later years his pedantic, stubborn dislike of Quantum Mechanics caused him to become disconnected from the theoretical physics community.

As an example of "the old guard" not accepting the new:

Ignaz Semmelweis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 - August 13, 1865), also Ignac Semmelweis (born Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp), [1][2] [2] was a Hungarian physician called the "savior of mothers" [3] [4] who discovered, by 1847,[3] that the incidence of puerperal fever could be drastically cut by use of hand washing standards in obstetrical clinics.[3] Puerperal fever (or childbed fever) was common in mid-19th-century hospitals and often fatal, with mortality at 10%-35%. [5]

While working at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria, Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions reduced the incidence of fatal puerperal fever from about 10 percent (range 5-30 percent) to about 1-2 percent. At the time, diseases were attributed to many different and unrelated causes. Each case was considered unique, just like a human person is unique. Semmelweis' hypothesis, that there was only one cause, that all that mattered was cleanliness, was extreme at the time, and was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. He was dismissed from his hospital and had difficulty finding employment as a medical doctor.

Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries, including his wife, believed he was losing his mind and he was in 1865 committed to an asylum (mental institution). Semmelweis died there only 14 days later, possibly after being severely beaten by guards.

Semmelweis' practice only earned widespread acceptance years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease which offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis' findings. Semmelweis is considered the father of antiseptic procedures.