Flynn effect vs genetic selection. 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. This one comes from Gardner et al (2019), which measures the cognitive ability of the fathers of autistic people and disaggregates those with and without intellectual disability. Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. Our ages when our son (1st child) was born were 27 (me) and 26 (my wife), and for our daughter (3rd child) we were 31 and 30. My experience watching a relative currently diagnosed with severe, non-verbal autism grow up is that his diagnosis is a catch-all for he doesnt seem capable of abstract thought but we have ruled out all the other, better-understood potential causes. No one can offer more than conjecture about the cause of his condition, and no one knows how to treat it (unless you listen to the vaccine-chelation charlatans the way that his father does) so why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). With more aggressive screening for such things, we would see a much smaller diagnosis gap. I was under the impression, that IQ was culturally biased, as DNA Markers would be. Hes amazing! Given the problems measuring IQ in autistic people (spiky profiles, huge differences between ravens vs. weschler) its also possible that intellectual disabilities are overreported at 15%. Is it kind of like a bimodal distribution, i.e. I talk more about this in parts 2 and 3 here. The genes that control the development of that definitely dont do so in a linear or easily explainable way. In sum, these findings suggest that neurodevelopmental social impairment exists in varied forms with varied etiologies and varied pathophysiologies, but the ASD diagnostic criteria do not identify a valid entity, Link to the entire piece https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf. Sure, most of them. I remember seeing that article 10 years ago and Ive never followed up, so replication not guaranteed. why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? 43 votes, 61 comments. And we know that theres differential infant mortality rates. Having charismatic superpowers isnt normal, and I suspect requires being sufficiently unconcerned with opinion sufficiently thing-oriented so as to cease to be normal. Broadly, intelligence might be, say: pattern recognition, ability to readjust priors, visual imagination, factual recall, procedural memory etc. 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. In other words, if your perceptual intelligence is much higher than your other types of intelligence, you will end up autistic. But you know what really has provided a massive survival advantage over the last few millenia of people clumping up together in cities? A preference (or aptitude for) logical or systems thinking. This model predicts something I believe is true many low functioning autistic people have real talents lurking in there, it is just really hard for them or others to access those talents because of all the broken stuff. g_i = 1 if the parameter is present, g_i = 0 if not. One other effect of this change in labelling, is that studies of autistics before and after the renaming cant be combined into any kind of meta-study, unless they are both much more detailed in their description of the grouyp they are measuring, and happen to target the same people. This requires a strongly non-linear sensitivity to hyperparameters, which is unusual for the fitness w.r.t. In this model, theres a ceiling to your intellectual ability thats set by each of those components. I would say that 80% of them carry a fair amount of weirdness with them, which shows in speech impediments, idiosyncratic/shitty clothing styles and obsessions with bizarre topics. Epistemic status: wild speculation backed up only by anecdotal evidence and theory. I am not, but we both initially bonded over (I dont know a way to put this delicately or more exactly) being objectively very smart people that dont perform intelligence very well, albeit different ways. The change is even starker at the extremes. Yes, I was thinking something very similar: Broadly speaking, its pretty clear that intelligence differeces come from differences in brain structure or organization, macroscopic and/or microscopic. Everyone else, enslaved or not, kept dying off working the fields. As for my own personal experience, Ive found that people with high conceptual intelligence (as opposed to mathematical intelligence) tend to be more charismatic. Genes encode changes to these hyperparameters. Each of us have different stories to share. Because they lacked the development of the auditory processing, it was very draining for them because it mostly came across as a large amount of noise. You could compare those estimates for IQ to those for height. . scalar traits in biological systems, which is usually approx. Any gene that increases A in a normal human makes that human more intelligent by pushing A closer to 10. Four things that make one delicious combination. Theres one other possible source of systematic bias in the data: living and available parents, especially fathers. several essentailly different things being lumped together under the label autism spectrum. A strong preference for routine. This fits with my observations of my family (parents, siblings, kids) and other science majors in college. If I suggest autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high, would that make sense to you? Or in the case of plants, their leaf structures are generated by a fractal pattern, and even small changes in the parameters of that fractal cause large changes in the ultimate pattern in a way that is chaotic and difficult to predict. (And, just to acknowledge what I suspect was the subtext of this entire post, thats really bad news for people who want to get significant IQ gains from genetic engineering.). Very simple and wrong toy model: This post is missing a discussion of the changing meaning of autism. As a result, we could have similar imbalances. Well, there is a point, but it takes a long time to grasp it, at which point you are significantly behind people who went along with them without questioning them. Autism-risk genes may just be plumping up the middle tiers, those who are noticeably intelligent but not staggering one-in-a-million test cases. If a high quantity of a good thing comes with a risk of problems that reduce the quantity again, then you could understand the ability to keep the problems at bay as foundation of the tower. Every year, we get like 4 or 5 students who are just ready for hardcore abstract mathematics from the get go, and since a few years my university allows them to take masters level lectures as early as they want. I feel like unless your definition of normal includes non-highly intelligent this is just so far from true. This article explores piano lessons for non-verbal and autistic students as a means for creating new and necessary pathways for abstract logic inherent in higher education. Hood got his M.D. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? Im reminded of the Simon Baron-Cohen theory about autism being like an extreme male brain in some sense. Why? If I personally were one of these hypothetical genius scientists in possession of technology that could reshape the world, I think that the most optimal strategy for me would be to offer this technology to the U.S. in exchange for a large sum of money say, $50 million. Blacks have an infant mortality rate more than twice as high as whites do. We cant do much about the genetic or random developmental stuff, but we can make sure most of the things that have stunted peoples intelligence over time go away. But African slaves survived. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. Maybe the pattern is something like this (calling rare IQ/autism boosting alleles IQb): Anyway, if the data were there, I would suggest an alternate explanation that a significant portion of gender dysphoria is socially mediated, and the autistic are isolated from the social phenomenon. Find company research, competitor information, contact details & financial data for AUCHAN RETAIL INTERNATIONAL of CROIX, HAUTS DE FRANCE. This always seemed nonsensical to me, because muscle is muscle; if two people are equally large, it shouldnt matter whether they were born that way or got that way through exercise. My parents were optometrists. My office mate is a big sports fan who cares a lot about his yard and house and is a fairly partisan Democratand whos also a mathematician who plays folk music and speaks several languages. It doesnt really present much evidence for this other than that autistic people seem to have high perceptual intelligence. Above a certain level of gain, the system _wants_ to break down. Because theres a correlation between IQ and race, overdiagnosing the children of a higher IQ group with autism (or underdiagnosing the children of a lower IQ group with autism) results in a correlation between IQ and autism which is actually just caused by racial bias in diagnosis rates. Take any part away, and you lose some intellectual ability. If you mean extraverted, no small number. Its not difficult to guess what someones response would be to many chit-chat topics. Let me write toy model, where intelligence Q is a function f of all heritable biological parameters that could possibly affect brain function (let us say, all possible variants of human genes in a DNA sequence of certain base pair length), denoted by g_1, , g_n. My wifes father (an engineer) is likely autistic. Highly intelligent people are likely to have different interests, read and talk about different things, than average peopledoes that make them not normal? This seems like circular logic to me. Ill share some info that might or might be helpful, since its just an anecdote. And autistic people have more health issues than non-autistic people do. This could be constructed as autistic behavior, but I dont buy it. I dont know. On the first level its obviously because of the genetic abnormalities they have, but its not like we could look at those gene differences and predict that those features would develop in that way. Research suggests that there is an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. Epistemic status: not too bad, certainly good enough to have my old head of department, a grand old neurogeneticist interested in this if still maintaining healthy scientific skepticism. The best civil servants get an extra allowance of weirdness points to allocate as necessary. This is consistent with the existence of people in the past who seem to be about as bright as humans get. Like, if you have one copy of a particular high-IQ gene you get high IQ, but two copies of that gene is too much of a good thing and you get autism? My understanding is that gender dysphoria is associated with certain structures or traits of the brain- transwomen tend to have certain identifiable feminized brain structures, and transmen to have masculinized brain structures. He taught himself the alphabet before he was 1 year old. Probably not the most important feature of this research but its a thunderous argument against modern day IQ-obsessed cryptoeugenicists. High IQ, excellent at math, maybe a little socially awkward but not too bad (we live in a reasonably large town, so there are lots of like-minded kids he can socialize with.) Im pretty sure that at some point the emulation efficiency hits diminishing returns- that its not emulations all the way up, in other words. The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. Judith Harris discusses this in one of her books. surveyed ~4000 MENSA members and found that in addition to being at a signficant increase in risk not just in ASDs and mood disorders but also in food allergies, asthma and 2x RR of autoimmune conditions compared to the general population. I dont have time to go through all the links this morning but wanted to add some more studies. This can coexist with a loss in the number of people with the highest potential intelligenceif were building sewers and safe water supplies at the same time were convincing our smartest 5% of people to take a vow of celibacy, well get that pattern. Its possible some degree of politics was involved in this decision: The World Health Organization also is eliminating Asperger syndrome from its International Classification of Diseases. But if you want to redefine incredible to mean the top 0.1 percent of the population, then yes, Bugmasters guess would be roughly accurate: Thered be approximately 1,250 people who were both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic in the Western world, or maybe 1,500-2,000 if you assume a minor positive correlation between being intelligence and being socially adept. 2. Does affliction rates vary with age of both parents? (When your edit window expires before you submit the edit, it just discards your text and you have to retype it? I married an autistic woman. If were gonna sit down and make Smores, we need marshmallows, chocolate, graham crackers, and a crackling fire. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/ paternal IQ/ autism seems pretty much decorrelated, which is strange given the 100% confidence that autism genes are IQ boosting. They propose that the reason evolution favors autism genes is that they generally increase intelligence. Thus, any sample of fathers is likely to overestimate the average IQ of fathers on average because fathers are around to be measured (arent in jail, arent dead, didnt just take off) have higher average IQ than those who who arent around to be measured. Drink your Brawndo! I dont think this paragraph fits the note in the image. There could be something similar going on with autism. What led me to ask this is stories of people who were deaf from birth whod get cochlear implants as adults. 9 hours ago View Detailed Check-in. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here. how could they recruit in such a way as to get a representative sample? Comparing intelligence to running fast understates the issue, it is much more like a complex rules-based game such as football, baseball, etc. Moreover, if your family isnt too bright, you might not even recognize that theres something funny about your latest kid. If Ronemus isnt missing some obscure de novo mutations, then people who get autism solely by accumulation of common (usually IQ-promoting) variants still end up less intelligent than average. Dunno, but you dont need to know the exact structure of the genotype to phenotype map to check whether the assumption is empirically correct. All this is a purely hypothetical thought-experiment, of course. I would expect that to be the case based simply on the premises. (Although, arent gene-behavior connections in general pretty suspect, as per your previous post?) The autism epidemic may have been caused by assortative mating (people with subclinical autism marrying other people with subclinical autism producing children who are autistic) The sort of people that would do polygenic scoring for IQ are exactly the sort of people whose children might already be at risk for autism (high systemisers) Yes indeed. My son was measured using the full Weschler and most of his scores were 96-99th percentile (thats VERY high). One possibility would be something like a tower-vs-foundation model. Awareness of it? The line here has an extra close-paragraph symbol, > (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here), which I assume is the one missing from the later section here. 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. In some sense, all autism has such-and-such characteristics studies are studying the way people like to define autism, and tell us nothing about any underlying disease process. Kindof like we could genetically engineer all people to be tetrachromats. Could you elaborate? So the technically autistic community could well be more intelligent on average than the general population, with the people who are actually labeled autistic being a particularly low-functioning subset of that population. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. I dont think 99% would stand out here, but I dont think itd quite be mediocre either. 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. Im not especially neurologically atypical, but enough that Im not confident I might not pass down some potentially deleterious genes. More generally, to relate to those people around you who are also bright. Evidence suggest otherwise. On that and other evidence, its pretty clear the above article isnt talking about autistics like me. Today, he weighs about 195. Other times, the conversations would seem weird as hell in most placesdiscussions of physics or evolution or game theory or genetics or whatever, with a high background level of assumed knowledge. Indeed. But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. You dont need a tower-and-foundation model to explain how both higher than usual prevalence of intelligence-associated genes in autistic individuals and extremely intelligent non-autistic people. This would be a more useful post if it addressed this change in terminology. ASD has no reliable early predictor, no unitary developmental course, no unitary life outcome, no unitary recurrence risk, no unitary pattern of BAP features, and no standard homogeneous subgroups. I still sometimes feel bad about whether that ended up slightly ruining some sort of investigation into which methods of teaching spelling were better or something like that. In primary school, for a while we used to have daily spelling tests, where we had to spell ten words. Autism As A Disorder Of High Intelligence, A link between Tay-Sachs gene and intelligence, https://hennyk.com/autism-and-perfect-pitch/, https://hennyk.com/book-perfect-pitch-in-the-key-of-autism/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZn4x3uOac, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd54l8gfi7M, distinction between people with high functioning autism and Aspergers. However, I wouldnt be surprised if a statistically high proportion of people here are autistic or have autistic family members. Thank you for introducing me to him. Also, if we do get to a bold new future of hyper-intelligent unilaterism, would the hyper-intelligent even want to sign up for it? Normality is just too vague to be quantifiable. This shows a) there isnt much of a childhood autism epidemic going on, its more likely that previous underdiagnosis occurred. I.e. This is true in a sense, but also alters what we mean by normal. Ive known people who were very mathematically and/or technically inclined who had poor social skills. Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. Shes unable to work in a normal public school classroom, but luckily we have a charter school that specializes in children with autism that has worked well for her. If your definition of weirdness includes beliefs and interests, then almost by definition anyone whose underlying cognition is unusually effective or ineffective will be weird. Thus, I cant think of anyone whos very intelligent and not weird ceases to be meaningful. This seemed to balance out by late middle-school/early high-school. Greg Cochran has a paper that discusses this and other IQ/genetic disease in Jews links here. The mean could easily shift without creating a bunch of geniusesit is probably much easier to raise the IQ of average or above average people, just through some relatively basic improvements and guidance. And rich people, on average, receive better medical care particularly rich white people. To some extent, incompatible advantages can stack by affecting entirely different things (one runner with salutary mutations affecting his legs, his lungs, and his adrenal gland) But to some extent they cant. I used to live in the DC area and still work with the civil service in my current job. He used to claim that he had an advantage in the ring because his muscle was all-natural, which made him stronger than people who got equally buff from working out. I believe autism is largely genetic and the genes that are associated with autism mainly perform functional roles in brain development and brain function. And in a sport like wrestling, which is heavily reliant on locks, holds, and pins, having those weak points could easily allow someone to overpower you. Maybe youre thinking of sickle cell anemia? As I understand it (Im an interested amateur, not an expert, so dont trust this too far! But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. I was thinking of Sickle Cell Anemia, where if you get the gene from one parent you are immune to malaria, while if you get from both, your blood cant carry enough oxygen. We often joke that my son learned English as a second language, it appeared that his primary language acquisition pathway just wasnt there. His auditory channel is very slow and only turns on when you say his name or repeat the question. It is often said that male IQ has the same mean as female IQ but greater variance, so you find more men in both tails of the IQ distribution. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page. This confuses me a little. Being a deadbeat or loser, or being perceived as same, may be a result, not a cause, of the specifically low-functioning types. https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/race-class-contribute-disparities-autism-diagnoses/. This gene developed in Africa, and can be seen as a fundamental reason for the transatlantic slave trade. Its 100% true. My relatively uninformed opinion would be: what the mutations might be affecting in lower-order terms are some subtle parameters of prior mapping, or something like a lower threshold for whats considered to be sufficient fit for model validity, or what kinds of sensory inputs to give particular significance to. But many do it for positive outcomes versus negative pressure, which is how I interpreted your question. You could also define normal as simply referring to a lack of explicit mental illnesses or emotional problems. Thats high, compared to the general population (below 1%) but 50% is weirdly high. control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here. The tower model looks close to my personal model, which has absolutely no experimental testing besides how the two of us feel about itbut generally I call it the Smore model. autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high. 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. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6013750/, Increasing repeat length was associated with higher GAI scores up until roughly 4041 repeats. For what its worth, I was diagnosed with Aspergers (which has now been folded into autism) at age 12 and as part of the diagnosis they did an IQ test with a processing IQ component and a verbal IQ component, and although the documents I have dont list the actual scores, the result is referred to in the documents as being very high in the verbal component and very low in the processing component. Im not a great student of philosophy, but I dont think most modern philosophers look at the writings of Plato or Descartes or Kant or Hume and think they were intellectual lightweights. Im going to interpret fitting in as being liked.. Autistic people have weird developmental trajectories. The fact that nobody has noticed and studied an effect in a subgroup is evidence that the subgroup does not have a large effect. ), in the general population, you will see a very strong correlation between the IQ score someone gets on the two different kind of IQ test, but among autistics, the correlation is much weaker. Pretending that people with autism diagnoses are typical of people with autism is useful when trying to treat the symptoms of autism; but ignoring less symptomatic people results in ineffective studies when trying to figure out causes and effects. Question the second. and they seem just as likely to have unplanned children as less intelligent people with equally bad impulse control. Id say the people in my field are shifted about half a sigma toward introverted, toward socially awkward, and toward tending to become obsessive about their interests/hobbies, but that leaves a lot of people whod seem pretty normal in most ways. when we did a comprehensive neuropsych his IQ came back above average (range 115-125ish depending on how you weight scales) which seems about right. You mentioned height, which I think is a good example too we have studies (possibly not good ones) showing that taller people have better outcomes, get treated nicer, are more attractive but people who get too tall have bad medical problems, shorter life expectancy. He initially appeared to learn the names of items when we attached labels with printed words on them around our house. Precision of it? Now imagine that someone was in that condition but *couldnt* turn it off. Interesting. So one model is that we should see two things happening at once, as a result of the assortative mating by IQ thats been going on for a couple generations now in the US: a. Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt. My stats-fu isnt strong enough to know if this actually pencils out, though. For example, girls were much less likely to receive an Aspergers diagnosis than boys, and girls were more likely to be diagnosed at an older agea disparity that points to bias. Also, IQ over 70 should be IQ under 70, and people have have autism should be people who have autism. Given the numerous different genetic correlates to autism, if one wants to preserve the diagnostic validity of autism by finding a single etiology, one might hypothesize that all of these genes affect a narrow set of brain circuitry in a similar way, but as discussed in the Waterhouse paper people have tried to do this and (per her lit review) failed to do so.

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