What role did autism play in human evolution?
sapiens.org
sapiens.org
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.
I guess it is less bad for them to be in programming then in marketing, but normals still have it better.
Also, they are good in some thigs - great with routine, rarely make mistake, rarely inattentive, great memory. Then again, as a rule, they have less good abstract thinking which limits them a lot, goes into rage because programmer on unrelated project used slightly different code style.
If we are talking about people who are normally diagnosable, diagnosis is not exactly shock for people who work with them. You may not be able to guess diagnosis, but you are aware that the person is off.
People on the spectrum are clumsy systematically - agains bosses, against customers, and time it hurts them.
Alpha geeks act like jerks to get ahed - put down opposition without needing to argue, protect their social status or raiser popularity by being fun. People on the spectrum are not fun. They act like jerks unintentionally - they don't understand what they are doing.
General population for men is approx 1 in 42 boys are on the autism spectrum (https://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/faq)
There are roughly 2 million Americans on the autism spectrum and roughly 3.6 million software developers.
So for the counter claim to be true pretty much every single person with autism in the US must work in Software development.
Right, and if you read the link you provided, you will see that they said that number constitutes a ten-fold increase over the past 40 years, which can be at least partially attributed to improved diagnosis and awareness.
So the actual number is probably much higher.
Why? Can you please walk me through your reasoning?
Autism is now well known and fairly easily identifiable.
Child care centers, schools, etc all have staff who can identify development issues and will refer to a trained medical professional to diagnose. At least in moderately sized cities.
That was not the case 40 years ago.
Nevertheless, majority of those diagnosed are not particularly talented at programming or it just happened that they became obsessed over something else.
I'm merely asserting that the parent comment also likely isn't backed by enough information to make their claim either.
I'll happily be proved wrong by citations in either direction.
If you act angrily after being interrupted, then people will interrupt you less. People with high social skills do that intentionally for exactly that reason. The difference is in inability to control the bad reaction. Merely being rude and self centered is not enough (autistic come across like self centered, but that is oftentimes unfair).
Consider how we as humans treat other non-human creatures. Do we consider the intelligence of a chicken, for example? It's inconvenient to do so, as it would suddenly thrust upon us ethical considerations to how we treat them. We (some) would rather just factory farm and eat them.
Perhaps because of our own limitations (culling less likely useful streams of thought) we tend to disregard things we don't understand. That does not mean they are lacking in value. It just means we have not made much effort to ascertain their capabilities.
Consider this perspective. If you were a stock investor, how would you value a modern Beethoven? You might try to determine the potential value of sales of his creations, but you would likely disregard the non-financial value of his music. Does that mean his music was not worth much?
Humans have a tendency to disregard that which they do not understand.
This is not necessarily a counter-argument since it is limited to the sample size of those you know.
The argument supposes that there would be enough benefit to the upside traits of autism disorders to keep the genes in the gene pool.
Also, it's not clear how the genes work or how the spectrum of autism-related conditions might have offered beneficial side-effects to group survival.
Interestingly, I think it follows that only in animals with "culture" would we find such selection. I wonder if it occurs in dolphins or primates, etc.
It is serious condition. Most would simply die young.
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:
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.
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?
http://www.jaysongaddis.com/the-shamanic-view-of-mental-illn...
In fact for many people suffering from autism, one of the symptoms is ADHD ;-)
> we are all “a bit autistic,” and we all fit somewhere along a spectrum of traits.
> 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 ); higher reproductive fitness in past or present populations (hah!) etc.
The other arguments like 'cave art', well... I'll leave that to others.
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.