so where's my Nobel?

[mellowtigger]

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?

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

The latest research on mirror neurons is fascinating but such a tease ... it doesn't (yet) explain much of anything. But damn is it interesting.

[otterlover01.livejournal.com]

I think it will happen like it did with the concepts of "race" and "homosexuality". Race is no longer a valid concept in Biological Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology since it has been demonstrated at nauseaem and with DNA hybridization that it is just a kind of illusory concept fixated by cultural, nor biological traits. "Homosexuality" as a concept is rapidly following the same fate as it is more and more clear that it is part of a sexuality continuum. That seems to be the way Nature usually presents things, in gradients and continuums, we are just beginning to understand that. L.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

re your moment: I spent ages describing the 'dance' to my partner John, it makes perfect sense to me, scientifically and otherwise; that there isn't a happily understandable pattern but there is a motion of the universe that everything spins around; and yes it's interconnected, going in and out of phase providing those moments of very brief understanding and calm as you briefly 'sync'. I don't really think I really could explain it that well though.

Ditto autism - provoked by a previous post of yours I mentioned autism and was surprised he'd never heard of it. Cue ages trying to explain and him saying 'well that sounds like me' and me getting a feeling I'd failed (although very mildly he might be correct, as myself - I wonder if everyone is in degrees?). And yes my father is an engineer, I get on well with engineers...they seem to be obsessed with alternative ways of thinking and realities.