I really shouldn’t read these books and papers. They make my head spin.
However, this is a thoroughly entertaining idea: is Autism a cognitive phenotype?
Once I had looked the words up in a few dictionaries and encyclopaediae, and read the paper a third (and fourth) time, I have to admit that the idea seems plausible: Autism isn’t a disability in the common sense of the word, but a genetic trait. It just so happens that this one has disadvantages, such as the inability to perceive and interpret “multifaceted communications.” (That’s a neat phrase I nicked from one of those academic papers…)
We can take as read all the anecdotal evidence of Autism-savants like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison (and the bloke Dustin Hoffman played in Rainman, as he is the subject of the next question people always ask when they find out about Little Nutter…) because, quite frankly, exceptions are not proof of anything. And these people are exceptional by any definition you care to use.
These papers agree with what I have already read about four potential causes of Autism. What is new in this particular idea is the observation that, after a century, there is still no categorical evidence that Autism is actually caused at all! The nearest these papers come to this is an acknowledgement of the evidence (but certainly not proof) that an environmental trigger may “exacerbate” or “induce” a pre-existing or latent Autistic condition. An almost rational observation, but it does not support the conclusion.
The papers blame the desire to find a cause of Autism on what they call an “emotional and material balance sheet” – we parents are only demanding a cause so that blame may be attached to the condition in order to allow understanding and acceptance. It also allows the non-Autistic to consider the person with Autism as somewhere ‘below’ them in terms of perfection, and in need of a cure.
(However painful it was to discover that Little Nutter has Autism, I don’t want him “cured.” Autism isn’t something he suffers from – it is him.)
What struck me most in these papers, though, was a collection of observations about genetic traits in families with no history of diagnosed Autism, but demonstrating “non-diagnosed pre-existing autistic traits.”
First: individuals who are mostly female and notable for the chaos they inflict upon their otherwise socially pragmatic family cultures. (I think I have mentioned my Mother-in-Law a couple of times…)
Second: socially apathetic family cores. (There is a reason why my side of the family is rarely mentioned. They don’t do anything interesting.)
Third: individuals with a low IQ but overdeveloped social skills, contrasted by individuals with a high IQ but underdeveloped social skills (aka “Williams’ Syndrome” but it could just as easily have been named after certain families joined together by Darling Wifey and myself.)
The reasons for these ‘opposite’ traits is because, prehistorically, social cognition evolved in two different, and opposing, ways. Autism is the result of the combination of these two opposing methods of cognitive evolution.
So, according to the idea, having an Autistic child was inevitable because Darling Wifey’s family and my family are not socially compatible. We shouldn’t have bred because of a theory that looks to me to be identical to 1920s style eugenics! Except the traits described (and offered as ‘proof’ for the theory) are about as objective as a horoscope. “Capricorn: your mother is as mad as a bag of hedgehogs and your mother-in-law could turn the Dalai Lama into Hannibal Lector. You will have an Autistic child.”
Still, if it works for racehorses…
