so where's my Nobel?

While I do believe that autism represents a different kind of human rather than just an inferior human, I make no attempt to hide the fact that evolution is messy business. Change requires experimentation, and experimentation in this context means that there will be casualties. For every creature in history that benefited from sprouting effective wings, there are countless hordes of kin that died as a direct result of their malformed bodies that failed to achieve such grace. Blind experimentation is effective. It is not, however, efficient.

So I have mixed reactions to news, like a recent article from the Times of London, about how genes associated with autism are also associated with great mental gifts. I dunno, do serious artists feel like they're being merely "artsy-craftsy" when their life accomplishments are compared to the results of people like Cezanne, Monet, or Picasso? How many times do autistics have to be compared to Einstein and Newton before we can get past this stage of our understanding?

Anyway, this story describes a study involving hundreds of students at Cambridge University that showed autistics (and relatives of autistics) were several times more likely to be found amongst mathematicians than amongst students of other studies.

The fact that autism runs in families shows that it is partly genetic in origin, but evolutionary theory suggests genes causing such a debilitating conditions ought to have been weeded out of the population. The Cambridge study hints at why this has not happened, suggesting that with variations in the way they are combined, such genes are beneficial.

On their own, such studies have to be treated cautiously because the numbers involved are small. In the Cambridge study, seven of 378 maths students were found to be autistic, compared with only one among the 414 students in the control group.

Other studies show similar patterns, so a trend is certainly developing. Eventually there will be a definitive list of autism genes, and expect soon afterwards a definitive list of autism-gene associations.

Patricia Howlin, professor of clinical child psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, studied 137 people with autism; 39 of them (29%) possessed an exceptional mental skill. The most common was outstanding memory.

She said: “It had been thought that only about 5%-10% of people with autism had such skills, but nobody had measured it properly, and it seems the number is far higher. If we could foster these skills, many more people with autism could live independently and even become high achievers.”

I have my moments, sure, but I'm not exactly making much progress on my physics grand unification theories. I have to devote a lot of attention to keeping a roof over my head and food in my belly, after all.

*digs exhaustively into the (proverbial) cereal box*

Where's my prize?