Coming up with elaborate speculations as to why a unitary autism would be characterized by wildly divergent and contradictory symptoms (like being very bright and perceptive and being completely non-verbal and unable to learn) just leads you further down the rabbit hole. Yes their interests and opinions are often eccentric, but they are self-aware of this and do not have problems navigating everyday interactions. First, IQ tests dont do a great job of measuring autistic people. People running an emulation of normal are usually not staggeringly intelligent. Its highly unlikely for someone with either of those conditions to become the Director of the FBI. By and large, they find conversations with non-genius people extremely boring, because they can predict exactly what the other person will say long before he says it. Optimizing a complicated biological machinery thing to do whatever intelligence is most likely a very difficult thing for that machine to do. Giftedness makes people more idiosyncratic. And thus a little more involvement from the microglia in utero or during early childhood might lead to a more efficient neural configuration and a higher IQ, especially if the involvement is more concentrated in the brain regions with more of an evolutionarily enforced margin toward resilience/survival rather than cognitive performance in normal humans. (*), Its not hard to measure my IQ, except that it generally falls at the top of the scale where the tests dont make effective distinctions. So, one can see how this would obviously lead to an increase in autoimmunity, but in one of the later chapters AEoA, Velazquez-Manoff also shows how autism (a least a lot of the time) is an inflammatory condition: for instance, autopsies uniformly showing neural inflammation, people with ASDs are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases than the general population and are more likely to have family members with autoimmune diseases, and for a few subjects treatment with immune-modulating intestinal worms providing some symptom relief even. My personal bet would be that different sorts of mutations associated with autism could be slotted into abstract prior-mapping-affecting categories manifesting through tiny quirks of cellular chemistry, and some degree of interplay between them and those that affect general nervous tissue metabolism and anatomy might also be the case. Rare de novo mutations, ie the autistic child gets a new mutation that their non-autistic parent doesnt have. The avoidance of eye contact. Yes. Perhaps different people train their brain using different optimization strategies, and when you optimize too well you risk ending up in the autistic basin of configuration space, which does well in the environment a fetus or baby faces. Yes. This is reminiscent, and logically inverted, from the much greater role of spontaneous mutations in these latter categories, particularly in genes known to have an even larger impact in cohorts ascertained for intellectual disability/developmental delay91. For purposes of a discussion of this, I think its best if we restrict ourselves to unusual behaviors. No guarantees in biology, but you can try to find a future partner with no such family history. Regarding Narcissim, the first website I pulled up had these as the first 3 symptoms: * Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? This is a common situation, but not with many genes of small effect. They get offended more if you question them than normal lawyers do, they have the 4chan-y social awkwardness that those communities jokingly call autism, etc. Being able to observe a large variety of children with autism (due to activities at the charter school), I agree that autism is a very strange catch-all with many different types of children diagnosed. The brain has hyperparameters, just like an artificial neural network. A couple of things about her birth stand out when comparing the two with the other children. My crank theory is that autism, when looked at through the environmental toxins are causing Very Serious Problems lens, starts looking suspiciously like an environmentally induced phenotype, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_assimilation. But then the answer to your question becomes so obvious that its hardly worth asking in the first place; there are countless people who are highly intelligent without suffering from any kind of psychological condition or personality disorder or mental/emotional instability. I remember seeing that article 10 years ago and Ive never followed up, so replication not guaranteed. Tongue in cheek (Swift Modest Proposal) style interventions given this model are: One just needs to consider a model where a brain is a complicated object whose organization and function depends on changes in the genetic blueprint in non-monotonic ways, and it is likely that all combinations (attainable via sexual reproduction) of genes that are beneficial alone or in some particular arrangements are not even more beneficial together; some of the potential arrangements are bound to be non-optimal or even catastrophic. First, doesnt the note say that the bottom graph (for each letter) is the likelihood that a father of x IQ will have a child with the specified outcome? One other observation that may interest people. We were grouped with autistic including low functioning autistics. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. And we're taking resources from the prior group to give to the latter. If Im not, that suggests one of three things: Genes are not something where you can say, this is good, more of it will be better. And so those are genes that show up as giving you a bump in your IQ in populations genetic studies. My bosses at my last job (normal modulo their ethnic origin). In other countries including those in developed areas like Western Europe and North America IQ has been on the rise. But the ability to notice patterns in the world, analyze phenomena and their causes/effects, understand highly complex and abstract concepts, and make connections between things all seem to be correlated with higher levels of social awareness and persuasive ability. As a practical matter of course these disorder clusters can easily overlap and often do, as seen in the most recent DSM when they allowed co-diagnosis of autism and ADHD for the first time (by popular demand pretty much!). Autism is associated with caesarian section https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2749054 Big muscles can also reduce range of motion. Could you elaborate? Girls also get autism, but seem to stay undiagnosed much more often. Theres a new paper out on how the frequency of variants that affect educational achievement (which also affect IQ) have been changing over time in Iceland. I guess it depends on how you define weirdness; I define it as having interests, beliefs, or though processes that are significantly different than most people I dont think Ive encountered any extremely intelligent people for whom none of the above are the case. Indeed, higher survival rates over time might also explain why were seeing a real increase in the number of autistic children over time more of them are living long enough to be diagnosed with autism in the first place. Normal is being concerned enough with appearing normal to try being normal, yes. There are no other cases of autism diagnosed in the immediate family. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/, https://sci-hub.tw/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18070881, Arizone State University Autism symptoms reduced nearly 50% two years after fecal transplant, The Economist More evidence that autism is linked to gut bacteria, Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie, https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf, http://cepuk.org/unrecognised-facts/diagnostic-system-lacks-validity/, https://medicine.uiowa.edu/psychiatry/content/ui-research-suggests-huntingtons-disease-gene-also-vital-human-development-and-intelligence, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2749054, https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/8/e029040.full. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. Im somewhere on the autism spectrum and have high levels of anxiety. And at least a few of them were probably just lying outright. The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others. Agree with your post, and especially with this part. Maybe specific areas for different such quirks of processing have some optimal Goldilocks zones for their values, which if all fit might give you some sort of the upper bounds of human intelligence-maybe there are multiple such optimal/viable configurations, however hitting all the targets simultaneously must be relatively rare, and some of the targets might be smallish, others might be essentially fixed without some de novo mutation for likely good evolutionary reasons. High-functioning autism looks more like the same polygenetic soup one finds with other complex personality characteristics like intelligence or Big Five character traits. I view it as absolutely crucial that bright kids get to socialize with kids like them, and also that someone teaches them how to be a functional person. This should be surprising; why would too many intelligence-promoting variants cause a syndrome marked by low intelligence? This is what we find; see Table 4 here. A simple model might be something like the genes for color vision. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. I feel like unless your definition of normal includes non-highly intelligent this is just so far from true. [3] Thats exactly what we observe here. If we take the Ronemus and Gardner studies seriously, the answer seems to be yes. 9 6 5 4 3 marries 9 2 5 4 3, children high chance of 10+ on first and autistic, children that are not autistic are just barely on the bright side of normal. The suggested results for selection against IQ are just in recent industrial time. In general, the less a dog resembles a wolf, the more likely it is to have musculo-skeletal, respiratory, and circulatory problems. I was getting my disorders mixed up, yes, but this is the one I was thinking of. What is the point of arbitrary social rituals? Like everyone else, they find autism risk genes are positively correlated with years of schooling completed, college completion, and IQ. This friend had been working for many years with Leroy Hood. Every autism case is caused by some combination of these three factors, and the more it is caused by normal genes, the more intelligence is likely to be preserved (~100% confidence), 4. Instead of autism causing low IQ, low IQ (in a mental architecture that typically causes high IQ) would cause autism, and then of course when you look at the relatives of a downwards outlier you will find higher IQ. So in that sense, maybe its just a phrasing problem. But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. Slate Star Codex was a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition, politics, and medicine. Autistic people being diagnosed with intellectual disabilities before theyre able to to talk and not really being undiagnosed when theyve demonstrated higher levels of ability is very much a thing. The best-studied are probably obstetric complications, eg a baby gets stuck in the birth canal and cant breathe for a long time.