
Autism as a Disorder of High Intelligence - jonbaer
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2016.00300/full
======
preordained
One popular anecdote or perhaps paraphrased statistical tidbit in the last few
years was that incidences of autism were unusually high in Silicon Valley and
particularly children of developers. Not that all developers have "high"
intelligence--but higher than average on the whole? Just wondering if there
might be any strengthening arguments to be made from connected studies. Of
course, could be a red herring that masks the critical factors, but if we had
to bet on the likelihood of a connection...maybe something there.

~~~
timwaagh
you might as well check a sample of developers for this disease and check
against a sample of the general population. its not just the children, you
know.

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Retric
This is confusing genetic markers for intelligence with intelligence. Building
half a bridge is not useful, and individual markers don't stand alone.

~~~
enord
He mentions that a: autists are dumber (i.e. do not express some or most of
the markers for high intelligence) but posess the genetic markers, and b: the
expression of intelligence markers of siblings/parents/higher-order relatives
of autists (specifically) is understudied and recommends it for further study.
[As far as I read it anyway]

I do believe that the "imbalance"-hypothesis he presents is a bit vague and
proposes several imbalances according to different (and possibly orthogonal)
models for intelligence, making it seem a bit unfalsifiable to me. Who knows.
Behavioral neuroscience based on MRI(or similar modalities) is a giant
sandcastle anyway, best not stack those results too high.

~~~
nikdaheratik
I agree that the details in some areas were vague, but this is a broad
overview and could lead to something testable if the research is followed
through.

The short version, to me, was that general intelligence is based on several
cognitive axes working together. I believe the paper lists 3-4 most of which
were separable, like verbal scores, mental rotation tests, etc. And with
Autism, you have 1-2 of those axes working above average but the rest not. To
falsify, you could break down IQ tests for individuals with autism and compare
some areas with the general population and also with each other. If they match
the expected pattern, they may be onto something, otherwise the theory is
incorrect.

------
CodeWriter23
Some background on this particular journal:
[http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-
journals...](http://www.nature.com/news/backlash-after-frontiers-journals-
added-to-list-of-questionable-publishers-1.18639)

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woodandsteel
I am not at all an expert on autism, but my understanding is that one of its
features is a strong deficiency in the ability to read human nonverbal
communication.

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matt_morgan
All of their markers for intelligence are suspect.

> including full-scale IQ and a PCA-based measure of g (Clarke et al., 2015),
> childhood IQ, college attendance, and years of education (Bulik-Sullivan et
> al., 2015), cognitive function in childhood and educational attainment (Hill
> et al., 2015), and verbal-numerical reasoning and educational level reached
> (Hagenaars et al., 2016)

I bet all those markers are more closely correlated with income levels in
childhood than with occurrence of autism (or anything else).

~~~
jackmott
Knowing, in isolation, that IQ is more closely correlated with income levels
in childhood than IQ is with thing X, does not imply that IQ is not a causal
contributor of X.

It could just be the case that IQ is partly genetic (in fact, it is) and that
IQ may be a causal factor in income levels to a stronger degree than it is for
autism or other things.

~~~
hardcandy
Hasn't IQ been proven to be not just partly, but mostly genetic? Barring
exposure to outright toxic environmental conditions.

~~~
skylark
IQ has the highest genetic correlation out of any trait we've observed in
Psychology - r ~ 0.7 if I recall correctly from my college days.

~~~
a_bonobo
This is actually interesting in terms of GWAS - there used to be a large
difference between "heritability" (~the measurable variance offspring shares
with their parents, like height in cm, which can be influenced by a ton of
parameters if you don't know about them/don't control them [like nutrition]).
In the age of genome-wide association studies the linked SNPs often correlate
much weaker than the heritability predicts (example: you could explain 10% of
variance with SNPs, but heritability says it should be 70%) - this was called
the problem of "missing heritability".

Some more complex models recover some of that missing heritability, these
slides are a nice summary:
[http://jvanderw.une.edu.au/Mod9Lecture_SNP_Her.pdf](http://jvanderw.une.edu.au/Mod9Lecture_SNP_Her.pdf)

There is a paper from 2011 looking at human intelligence
([http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/full/mp201185a.html](http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v16/n10/full/mp201185a.html))
and using a little bit of modeling they got the correlation up high:

>We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and
51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is
accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers
and unknown causal variants.

However, look at that "unknown", because the same abstract says:

>Finally, using just SNP data we predicted ~1% of the variance of crystallized
and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample.

Using their SNPs alone it's only 1%. I assume the "true" genetic variability
(~~~heritability) is somewhere in between those two values, since the 40/50%
number seems to assume that these unknown variants will be discovered (they
haven't yet AFAIK, maybe they don't exist, maybe they do).

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clifanatic
Well, I know I'm definitely too weird to get a date. It's nice to think that
means I'm intelligent.

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deepnet
Eric Raymond's take :

"Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and
status-maintainance activity."

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060#more-7060](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7060#more-7060)

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Aelinsaar
It just doesn't stand up to scrutiny, especially given how many people are
autistic.

~~~
LifeQuestioner
An estimated 1% of the population currently (including those estimated as not
diagnosed). Subject to rise as the DM-4/5 diagnostic criteria adapts. Why does
this fact of 1% of the population, mean the article is not viable?

~~~
Aoyagi
I'd think the amount dropped significantly once Asperger's was removed from
the spectrum in DSM-5 (although this article seems to ignore that fact).

~~~
scott_s
That's not my understanding of what happened in DSM-5. My understanding is
that Asperger's was removed as a separate diagnoses, as it now falls under
Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The Wikipedia article seems to match my prior
understanding
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum)),
"The DSM-5 redefined the autism spectrum to encompass the previous (DSM-IV-TR)
diagnoses of autism, Asperger syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder not
otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), and childhood disintegrative disorder."

~~~
jsprogrammer
>The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each
edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The
weakness is its lack of validity.

[http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-
dia...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-
diagnosis.shtml)

Time for a new book.

~~~
scott_s
I like Steven Novella's nuanced take on this issue:
[https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-
for...](https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/dsm-5-and-the-fight-for-the-
heart-of-psychiatry/)

