At 10/1/09 02:57 PM, Sheizenhammer wrote:
If it is tied to genetics (while there is some evidence to suggest this, we don't know for certain yet), then it's hardly evolution. How many times have you seen an autistic person have kids?
Alright you silly sausages. Dr. Bijhan is here to clear up your ludicrous concepts of evolution!
A) THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FAILED EVOLUTION
"Failed" means there was an attempt. There is nothing guiding evolution. Evolution IS NOT the appearance of mutations in the genetic pool. That's just mutation. Evolution is a force that operates upon those mutations. Remember, the theory of evolution vastly outdates the study of genetics, so they are not linked very closely. Evolution is simply the principle "That which will make more of itself will continue to make more of itself. That which cannot make more of itself will not make more of itself." Simple. Evolution is the principle that those which promote the repetition of their own memes - whether through alteration or conservation - will have their memetic data continued.
B) YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE KIDS YOURSELF TO PARTICIPATE IN EVOLUTION
The vast majority of individual ants do not have sex organs. They don't reproduce. The same is true of bees, termites, and naked mole rats. Even in many mammalian species there are those who are integral to the community but prohibited from procreating. In wolf packs only the alpha male and alpha female are allowed to mate. In human society we have developed a complex social construct known as homosexuality. But these individuals are not absent from the forces of evolution. Their memetic patterns (in biological terms, their genes) are present in other organisms. Worker ants ensure the survival of their own genes by serving the Queen, who CAN reproduce. Wolf packs will hunt and kill food for the Alpha puppies because they are closely related - perhaps cousins. And homosexual humans can provide for their brothers and sisters; nieces and nephews; and thanks to a wonderful human evolutionary advantage called "thinking", they can understand the service done to their species by raising another human child mostly unrelated to them. Evolution is still in action.
C) AUTISM IS NOT ADVERSELY ADAPTED
Autism is a complex condition. Rather simplified in the original post, it is NOT always coupled with "savant syndrome". Only a small percent of autistic people are very good at ANYTHING we can see. Some are. But again, most are not. Asperger's is controversial in that it is not well defined in the medical community. There is a clear dissonance between psychiatric medicine (medical doctors who specialize in your gray matter) and psychology (the non-medical study of human cognition) regarding the condition.
What's important to understand is that evolution depends on diversity. Genetically indiverse populations, such as agricultural bananas, have historically been subject to near extinction. When all of the species shares the same weaknesses, it can exploited all at once by another organism or operated upon by a natural calamity. Human beings have cloned so many bananas for industrial agriculture that when a parasite began eating our crops we nearly lost every commercial banana plant on the face of the Earth a few years back. We had to splice them with local, native varieties until a genetic resistance to the parasite was found.
What does this have to do with autism? Autism is a cognitive condition. It is not a DISorder, it is simply a DIFFERENT order. Autistic people percieve the world with a different basic set of symbols than most humans, and mostly different from one another. Carl Jung developed a theory of "collective subconscious" - that all humans understand certain symbols the same way. Dragons, heroes, doors, damsels in distress, check marks, stick figures - no matter who you are, what language you speak, what you've been taught, these things all mean the same thing to everyone. In our dreams and in our literature. People with autism are the exception. They do not understand this fundamental codec. We're all working on Windows, and people with autism have made their own OS that's incompatible.
This is positively adapted. We need this diversity in our population. Who knows when the weakness in our way of thinking will be undermined? I can't imagine how - but that's precisely the point, isn't it? We have no way of knowing what could possibly take advantage of our basic mode of thought and turn it against us. If we did, it couldn't. But something out there in the great big universe might. Something LITERALLY unimaginable. So we need some SERIOUSLY free thinkers. People with autism don't just think outside the box, they think of the box in a wholly different way, and it may save the human species some day.
