
What role did autism play in human evolution? - sajid
http://www.sapiens.org/evolution/autism-human-evolution/
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TomasEkeli
The autists I know of have no special skills or magical insights. They're
really struggling to get through normal days, requiring constant supervision
from full-time carers 24 hours. And it has to be the same carers that come at
the same time every day. Their lives are really shitty, interspersed with
small joys.

~~~
poizan42
Well, sounds like the only people you know to be autistic are low
functional...

Traits that may be beneficial in milder versions can often be detrimental if
too expressed. If you are working with software developers then there's a good
chance that some of your colleagues falls on the spectrum. It's probably not
something they go around telling people about, assuming they are even
themselves aware.

~~~
douche
I sometimes wonder if we sometimes self-label ourselves, in general, as being
"on the spectrum" just so we can justify getting pissy when uninteresting
people interrupt and harass us while we are trying to concentrate on
interesting problems.

~~~
briholt
I think this is the DSM's criteria for high functioning autism.

~~~
poizan42
Having difficulty getting back on track after an interruption is part of ADHD
(well, more difficulty than the average person, interruptions disrupts
everybody's concentration to some degree). There is a high level of
comorbidity between Autism Spectrum Disorders and ADHD-PI (formerly known as
ADD).

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Mz
This article is crappy. The closing quote is attributed to someone whose name
I don't know, but they probably got it from Temple Grandin.

 _All human evolution was driven by slightly autistic Asperger’s and autistic
people. The human race would still be sitting around in caves chattering to
each other if it were not for them._

She has a PhD and has designed something like half of all the cow processing
plants in the U.S. (This is probably not the right name for them.) She is
endlessly fascinating and if you have a child who is ASD (or if you have other
reason to be interested) and you want some inspiration that isn't some sort of
feel-good tripe, you should check out her works. There are a number of good
books either by her or about her and she is a brilliant advocate for the
autism community.

Her website:

[http://www.templegrandin.com/](http://www.templegrandin.com/)

~~~
boomboomsubban
His quote comes from an interview about a 2006 book he published, Grandin
loved the book and spoke highly of it around then, and then her quote comes
from her 2008 book.

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louithethrid
It could be a usefull specialisation for a medieval society needing
automatization.

Not every specialisations usefullness is instantly obvious under the very
artifical circumstances of a heavy industrialized society.

Beeing a warlord was usefull for many centurys, but today it only gets you
into a CEO chair and stomache ulcers. Shizophrenia was a good trait for aeons,
when it came to beeing a priest/shaman, a artist or simply some loner hunter,
who could follow prey for weeks without the onslaught of isolation anxiety.

Nothing of this usefullness can be glimpsed today. In addition - autism seems
to manifest itself mostly in the west, so maybee its really new - and its
ability to pay the ferrywomans price, directly or indirectly, has yet to be
established in societys under crisis.

~~~
ShabbosGoy
> Shizophrenia was a good trait for aeons, when it came to beeing a
> priest/shaman, a artist or simply some loner hunter, who could follow prey
> for weeks without the onslaught of isolation anxiety.

I'm not sure how useful schizophrenia would be as a hunter. Being a hunter
requires a high degree of inhibitory control and some level of metacognitive
ability. Wouldn't constantly hearing voices all the time distract the hunter
from hunting and tracking his prey down?

~~~
sdiupIGPWEfh
My only half-serious musing is that, as with autism, we're all somewhere on
the schizophrenic spectrum, in some sense. Hearing one voice in your head is a
step above hearing none. Having multiple voices, sourced from different
subconscious processes, yet only heard one a time and that you can't
distinguish between thus perceiving as a single "you", might be a step above
just one.

~~~
qb45
AFAIK schizophrenic voices are perceived as indistinguishable from actual,
external voices of other people talking. It's a different thing than hearing a
voice in one's head and this is what sets schizophrenics apart, not the number
of distinct voices.

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safanycom
I think it acts as a genetic counterbalance to ADHD. They gave the ability to
blue sky a problem (ADHD) or a dictionary attack (ASD) or Fuzz a problem (Both
together). Twice exceptional are attracted -- which carries on the gene pool.

~~~
bad_user
I think you have the wrong idea about how autism manifests itself.

In fact for many people suffering from autism, one of the symptoms is ADHD ;-)

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nv-vn
Probably none? A gene doesn't have to be beneficial to stay in the gene pool.
A lot of this seems like a stretch. This isn't in any way meant to say that
autistic people aren't useful members of society, but claiming that autism is
some advantage doesn't have any real backing to it as far as I can tell. It's
no surprise that all the people interviewed in the article are autism
specialists. I don't think most other researchers would see the same things
looking at the data.

~~~
dwringer
"A gene" ... what gene? The article itself states:

> we are all “a bit autistic,” and we all fit somewhere along a spectrum of
> traits.

~~~
whatshisface
You might want to loosen up your interpretation a bit to understand his point
- if a gene doesn't have to be beneficial to say in the gene pool, then a
vague blob of thousands of genes doesn't​ have to be beneficial either.

~~~
dwringer
Thanks, I actually do understand what you mean but then I simply must refer
you to the rest of what I quoted. There is no distinction, it simply comes
down to a diagnosis based on a number of factors - otherwise we are "all a bit
autistic". Since that diagnosis is a relatively recent invention, it's hard to
understand your argument about "autistic people" historically.

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dredmorbius
Related, Darwin's exploration of emotion:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotio...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions_in_Man_and_Animals)

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gwern
This is an odd blog post. I'm not sure the authors really understand the
genetics they are trying to invoke. For example, when they say:

> Research has shown that some key autism genes are part of a shared ape
> heritage that predates the “split” that led us along a “human” path. This
> was when our ancient ape ancestors separated from other apes that are alive
> today. Other autism genes are more recent in evolutionary terms—though they
> are still more than 100,000 years old.

This is a really misleading use of 'autism gene'. All this means is that a
particular 'gene', in the sense of a large chunk of DNA which codes for a
protein and _not_ the usual sense of a distinct variant/allele present in only
part of the population, when damaged or modified leads to autism. (So you
would take all the GWAS hits and note that the SNPs tend to cluster in
particular gene-regions.) This might tell you something about what biochemical
or developmental pathways lead to autism when broken, but it doesn't tell you
anything like 'autism is good' or 'autism helps humanity evolve'. At best, it
tells you that autism is sometimes connected to relatively recent biological
changes, which is not a surprise (what would an autistic chimpanzee look
like?). You could make the exact same argument about schizophrenia: 'genes'
(in the sense of large genetic units) in which schizophrenia SNPs often turn
up are also often relatively recently evolved or related to the nervous
system. Did 'humanity need schizophrenia to evolve'? Seems unlikely. The
parsimonious interpretation is that the human central nervous system and other
things have been evolving over the past 200k+ years and diverging from the
other primates, supporting modern human intelligence and cognition, and autism
and schizophrenia are simply ways that our brains can break and the newly-
evolved stuff can break often thanks both to the constant introduction of new
mutations and demographic events like Neanderthal introgression. (Neanderthal
variants typically are harmful and are being evolved away. That must have come
as a shock to those people claiming Neanderthal contributions made you smarter
or something.)

If you wanted to show that autism and genetic variants disposing to autism
really does offer adaptive value or was important to the process, rather than
simply reflecting the fragility of the human mind and long-standing mutation
load, you would look for signs of selective sweeps for autism variants (either
the rare variants of large effect or SNPs; none have been identified) or at
least frequency-dependent selection (inconsistent with the additive genetic
architecture), beneficial genetic correlations (there are none except some
with intelligence), predicting any kind of better health (the opposite,
indeed, just today:
[http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/09/148247](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/09/148247)
); higher reproductive fitness in past or present populations (hah!) etc.

The other arguments like 'cave art', well... I'll leave that to others.

~~~
contingencies
I'll defer on you to genetics, but I think you are unfairly dismissing the
larger point raised, ie. that _different societies have historically had
different interpretations of, degrees of acceptance of and methods of
utilizing the different qualities of autistic people, some potentially more
enlightened than ourselves_.

FWIW I found the reindeer herder story quite convincing. I have personally met
and spoken to some fascinating people who could be ascribed a similar
position, eg. a Himalayan _Naxi_ hermit who endures near total isolation 9
months per year (his daughter and grand daughter took me with them on a rare
visit, which was at the treeline a whole (predawn to nightfall) day's return
walk above the nearest settlement). Approaching his position, we were
overtaken by an animal skin clad mountain _Yi_ vagabond who could double our
pace at altitude. (My guides explained he would summit and descend the snow-
capped mountain range for the safety of the next valley before nightfall.) A
friend of mine from a young age is heavily autistic, to the point where only
the extreme devotion of his father allowed him to begin to speak. He now runs
a video store with his encyclopedic knowledge of film.

~~~
gwern
Whether historical societies were really all that tolerant is an interesting
question, but the sense I get from OP is some extremely dubious
misinterpretations of science and art in the service of pushing a pro-autism
agenda.

