AS and evolution

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If NTs died out, would female NTs survive longer than male NTs?

What?

I'm just talking about the hypothetic situation that NTs began to disappear. Would female NTs stay around longer than male NTs? Because they say females are less likely to get AS than males.

Seems more likely that if either males or females or Aspies or NTs died out, the human species would also die out at the same time.

I'm not sure if this exactly answers the question, but since females have eggs and are the only sex currently capable of giving birth, some have speculated that with genetic engineering females will be capable of surviving without males.

There was a novel called Alph printed in the late 60s that had this as a theme. Men die out and women are left to reproduce without them, with the help of genetic engineering. Then about 500 years later a man is found frozen in Arctic ice. His sperm is used to impregnate a woman, then she gives birth to a male child, turning civilization upside down. My dad used to have tons of old hippie era scifi novels, some of the ideas in them were pretty trippy.

I think the OP meant, "If AS became the dominant phenotype, would it happen more slowly among women than among men?"

I don't think, personally, that AS could ever become dominant; NTs are too versatile. The generalists are more likely to survive disasters than the specialists; and while it's beneficial to a population if there are autism spectrum genetics in that population, a population being entirely autistic would be too unbalanced to be adaptive.

So I don't think it would happen at all. We should just reach a balance point at which the number of autistic people in a society is most beneficial to that society. I'm thinking that that point is somewhere around 1-2%, but not much higher than that. Ultra-specialized people are fine, but who does the general work--producing food, running machinery, coordinating the society? You don't need that many specialists; and anyway, if you have too many autistic people, you increase the number of autistic people that the society has to support, which it can only do up to a certain point... eventually the benefits of having somebody who has a certain specific low/high skill profile to do a certain specific job will balance out the costs of supporting the disabilities involved with that skill profile... at that point, the people who can't find well-paid jobs because the specialized niches left over don't fit as well will start to have fewer children because they can't support them as well. So it's self-limiting once the available societal roles run out. Theoretically if everyone were autistic it would work better than if a very small number were; but there's no way you'd get anywhere close to half. People who need things most people don't will tend to be at a disadvantage, and that disadvantage is probably enough to keep them from ever becoming the majority. The only way I could see it happening is if other neurodiverse people also increased in number, allowing specialist roles that don't fit most autistic profiles to be filled too. You'd still have a minority of autistics, but you'd also have other non-NT types increasing, to the point that NTs may still be the largest group, but total no more than a tenth of the population... A world like that would be very interesting and extremely interdependent. I think it would require technology we don't have right now.

I think that autistics are evolving faster already since I've had the opportunity to be an observer over a relatively long period of time and the chance to work with many kids over the years. It's my opinion, and just that, that children today on the spectrum are not nearly as severly affected as was once more common.

I think the less severely affected are just being diagnosed more often.

They are ALSO less likely to have kids!

There is apparently no set limit on males having kids, but a female's ability starts to decrease by 30! SO, in the apparent context of the question, MALES would live longer!

I think it would be a very quiet and lonely world.

Wait.. are there really more people under the spectrum around say than 50 years ago? Or is it that now they have a name for it, they are just diagnosing more? I find it interesting how many parents are diagnosed with having an ASD right after their kids are diagnosed.