Published on 12, July, 2020
A parent who's eldest son has AS has serious doubts that it is genetic in origin as nobody else in the family has it. She thinks that it is caused by teaching children reading, maths, and academic subjects at too young an age. Her theory is that the human brain of a baby is very 'plastic' but hardens with age. If academics are taught at a very young age then the brain is shaped and wired towards this often at the detriment of people skills. If academics are not taught then the brain will shape and wire itself towards people skills. In other words, teach academics and the child will be able to read a book but struggle to read people. Do not teach academics and the child will be able to read people but will not be able to read a book until later in life.
Her eldest son was pushed with academics at a young age and he could read and do simple sums whilst at nursery – something not taught until reception class – but he rarely interacted with the other children and chose to play with toys alone. His three younger siblings were not pushed academically at a young age but were academically average and have grown up neurotypical.
There is some anecdotal evidence that AS (in Britain at least) is more common in middle class areas where parents value academic education, want their children to do well academically, and have plenty of books in the house, than in lower class areas where parents just prefer their children to muddle along and do not value academic education or have many books at home.
While I think that the original point is probably without merit (however there is potential for an environmental cause for ASC behaviours if, for example, a child were prevented from any form of socialisation in early life, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23352169
), I do think that there has been an interesting article posted regarding heritability.
Here is another:
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2040-2392-5-5
However, after reading a few papers, I have found that the genes selected as indicating autism are different between each paper. It is also worth bearing in mind, as has been previously stated, most current studies on ASC have been onthose with severe austim (as this is the easiest to diagnose):
http://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(14)01167-3/abstract
As such there may not be an easily identifiable genetic ‘cause’. Dominant and recessive as definitions are misleading, as in many cases the ‘recessive’ gene is still expressed along-side the ‘dominant’.
Regarding an environmental cause, I have seen no evidence that this is the case. My experiencec is that everyone is different; some children will learn reading and writing very quickly, and be willing to do so in their free-time, some will not. In my case, despite the best efforts of my parents, I wasn’t able to read until I was 6.
Additionally, surely a more likely ‘cause’ for an increase in ASC cases is an adjustment of diagnsotic criteria, availability of diagnosis (i.e. the variety, and even professional awareness, of diagnoses simply wasn’t available until recently), public awareness of the condition (i.e. liklihood of diagnosis).
Until the diagnostic criteria is singly defined and boundries set for condition types, I feel that simply looking at the ‘number’ (or factor of population) diagnosed with this condition will be misleading.
Additionally, of the genes involved, I would be extremely surprised if there was a modern human on Earth that wasn’t in posession of all of the route 66 genes (or those in the previously posted example) as they appear largely vital to development. To simplify; the studies are unlikely to find ‘missing’ genes, but instead ‘under or over-expressed’ ones. Ergo racial 'immunity' is extremely unlikely.