The autists I know of have no special skills or magical insights. They're really struggling to get through normal days, requiring constant supervision from full-time carers 24 hours. And it has to be the same carers that come at the same time every day. Their lives are really shitty, interspersed with small joys.
This article is crappy. The closing quote is attributed to someone whose name I don't know, but they probably got it from Temple Grandin.<p><i>All human evolution was driven by slightly autistic Asperger’s and autistic people. The human race would still be sitting around in caves chattering to each other if it were not for them.</i><p>She has a PhD and has designed something like half of all the cow processing plants in the U.S. (This is probably not the right name for them.) She is endlessly fascinating and if you have a child who is ASD (or if you have other reason to be interested) and you want some inspiration that isn't some sort of feel-good tripe, you should check out her works. There are a number of good books either by her or about her and she is a brilliant advocate for the autism community.<p>Her website:<p><a href="http://www.templegrandin.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.templegrandin.com/</a>
It could be a usefull specialisation for a medieval society needing automatization.<p>Not every specialisations usefullness is instantly obvious under the very artifical circumstances of a heavy industrialized society.<p>Beeing a warlord was usefull for many centurys, but today it only gets you into a CEO chair and stomache ulcers.
Shizophrenia was a good trait for aeons, when it came to beeing a priest/shaman, a artist or simply some loner hunter, who could follow prey for weeks without the onslaught of isolation anxiety.<p>Nothing of this usefullness can be glimpsed today.
In addition - autism seems to manifest itself mostly in the west, so maybee its really new - and its ability to pay the ferrywomans price, directly or indirectly, has yet to be established in societys under crisis.
I think it acts as a genetic counterbalance to ADHD. They gave the ability to blue sky a problem (ADHD) or a dictionary attack (ASD) or Fuzz a problem (Both together). Twice exceptional are attracted -- which carries on the gene pool.
Probably none? A gene doesn't have to be beneficial to stay in the gene pool. A lot of this seems like a stretch. This isn't in any way meant to say that autistic people aren't useful members of society, but claiming that autism is some advantage doesn't have any real backing to it as far as I can tell. It's no surprise that all the people interviewed in the article are autism specialists. I don't think most other researchers would see the same things looking at the data.
This is an odd blog post. I'm not sure the authors really understand the genetics they are trying to invoke. For example, when they say:<p>> Research has shown that some key autism genes are part of a shared ape heritage that predates the “split” that led us along a “human” path. This was when our ancient ape ancestors separated from other apes that are alive today. Other autism genes are more recent in evolutionary terms—though they are still more than 100,000 years old.<p>This is a really misleading use of 'autism gene'. All this means is that a particular 'gene', in the sense of a large chunk of DNA which codes for a protein and <i>not</i> the usual sense of a distinct variant/allele present in only part of the population, when damaged or modified leads to autism. (So you would take all the GWAS hits and note that the SNPs tend to cluster in particular gene-regions.) This might tell you something about what biochemical or developmental pathways lead to autism when broken, but it doesn't tell you anything like 'autism is good' or 'autism helps humanity evolve'. At best, it tells you that autism is sometimes connected to relatively recent biological changes, which is not a surprise (what would an autistic chimpanzee look like?). You could make the exact same argument about schizophrenia: 'genes' (in the sense of large genetic units) in which schizophrenia SNPs often turn up are also often relatively recently evolved or related to the nervous system. Did 'humanity need schizophrenia to evolve'? Seems unlikely. The parsimonious interpretation is that the human central nervous system and other things have been evolving over the past 200k+ years and diverging from the other primates, supporting modern human intelligence and cognition, and autism and schizophrenia are simply ways that our brains can break and the newly-evolved stuff can break often thanks both to the constant introduction of new mutations and demographic events like Neanderthal introgression. (Neanderthal variants typically are harmful and are being evolved away. That must have come as a shock to those people claiming Neanderthal contributions made you smarter or something.)<p>If you wanted to show that autism and genetic variants disposing to autism really does offer adaptive value or was important to the process, rather than simply reflecting the fragility of the human mind and long-standing mutation load, you would look for signs of selective sweeps for autism variants (either the rare variants of large effect or SNPs; none have been identified) or at least frequency-dependent selection (inconsistent with the additive genetic architecture), beneficial genetic correlations (there are none except some with intelligence), predicting any kind of better health (the opposite, indeed, just today: <a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/09/148247" rel="nofollow">http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/09/148247</a> ); higher reproductive fitness in past or present populations (hah!) etc.<p>The other arguments like 'cave art', well... I'll leave that to others.