Is Aspergers the next evolutionary step for humans?

  • Here is a thought:

”What if we are not odd, but Aspergers is the next step in evolution for humans?”

We are no less loving or empathetic than other humans.  As someone once said, we perhaps feel too much. 

So perhaps we evolutionary firsts!

Parents
  • Yes, it's a nice idea. Nobody knows though, really. We don't know what might happen in the future - humans might be replaced by robots or wipe themselves out in some other way. (Personally I hope not. Some of my best friends are human.)

    I have felt that joining an autism group that we're really diverse and most do seem to have a unique talent, so it's a bit like another autistic mutant joining the X-Men.

    There has of course been a lot of medical research on autism - and sadly much less social research into how to improve quality of life, because in many ways the cause doesn't matter. You hear figures of between 20-50% of autism being genetic, which raises questions. How far back do these genes go? (Maybe 5% are de novo mutations, that is when it's not inherited from parents.) And do these genes have advantages, or in other words are they 'adaptive'?

    So how do we interpret any autism gene variants? Are they 'defects' that cause a variety of symptoms such as digestive or auto-immune problems as well as changes in the structure of the brain? Or have they been around for hundreds of thousands of years? It seems H sapiens sapiens carries about 1% Neanderthal DNA, and there's a theory that Neanderthals didn't have language (although they did have slightly larger brains). At rdos.net you'll find talk of the idea that rather than the next evolutionary step, we're the previous one.

    But my favourite theory is that autism is a 'spandrel' for human intelligence - it's not advantageous itself, but autistic/AS people help the community by their ingenuity. Think of the amount of back pain humans suffer because we've only evolved to walk upright relatively recently, and evolution hasn't ironed out all the bugs. We've only evolved eg writing much more recently, so there are even more 'bugs' in that, including autism, that mean that although the individual talents can be impressive, the various brain functions don't work well together 'globally'. That might be a bit like the same genes for malaria resistance - another recent adaptation - also producing sickle-cell anaemia. There is quite a lot of recent evidence that autism genes are correlated with intelligence or years in education, but they're not correlated either way with psychosis, depression, diabetes, obesity or Alzheimer's (Bulik-Sullivan et al, 2015) (Clarke et al, 2016). They don't seem to be intrinsically maladaptive.

    So most autism gene variants (assuming they exist and the geneticists are right) at least aren't unambiguously deleterious. If there were pre-natal screening against autism genes, humanity would very probably be shooting itself in the foot and stopping evolution of intelligence, so to that extent you might be right. As I say, nobody knows.

Reply
  • Yes, it's a nice idea. Nobody knows though, really. We don't know what might happen in the future - humans might be replaced by robots or wipe themselves out in some other way. (Personally I hope not. Some of my best friends are human.)

    I have felt that joining an autism group that we're really diverse and most do seem to have a unique talent, so it's a bit like another autistic mutant joining the X-Men.

    There has of course been a lot of medical research on autism - and sadly much less social research into how to improve quality of life, because in many ways the cause doesn't matter. You hear figures of between 20-50% of autism being genetic, which raises questions. How far back do these genes go? (Maybe 5% are de novo mutations, that is when it's not inherited from parents.) And do these genes have advantages, or in other words are they 'adaptive'?

    So how do we interpret any autism gene variants? Are they 'defects' that cause a variety of symptoms such as digestive or auto-immune problems as well as changes in the structure of the brain? Or have they been around for hundreds of thousands of years? It seems H sapiens sapiens carries about 1% Neanderthal DNA, and there's a theory that Neanderthals didn't have language (although they did have slightly larger brains). At rdos.net you'll find talk of the idea that rather than the next evolutionary step, we're the previous one.

    But my favourite theory is that autism is a 'spandrel' for human intelligence - it's not advantageous itself, but autistic/AS people help the community by their ingenuity. Think of the amount of back pain humans suffer because we've only evolved to walk upright relatively recently, and evolution hasn't ironed out all the bugs. We've only evolved eg writing much more recently, so there are even more 'bugs' in that, including autism, that mean that although the individual talents can be impressive, the various brain functions don't work well together 'globally'. That might be a bit like the same genes for malaria resistance - another recent adaptation - also producing sickle-cell anaemia. There is quite a lot of recent evidence that autism genes are correlated with intelligence or years in education, but they're not correlated either way with psychosis, depression, diabetes, obesity or Alzheimer's (Bulik-Sullivan et al, 2015) (Clarke et al, 2016). They don't seem to be intrinsically maladaptive.

    So most autism gene variants (assuming they exist and the geneticists are right) at least aren't unambiguously deleterious. If there were pre-natal screening against autism genes, humanity would very probably be shooting itself in the foot and stopping evolution of intelligence, so to that extent you might be right. As I say, nobody knows.

Children
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