Could Autism Be an Evolutionary Step Forward?

[meadowlander]

43. ASD can be comorbid with intellectual disability, epilepsy, etc.

I don't think the science is there yet that it's autism that "causes" either high or low IQ. Autism is a spectrum of neurological traits like attention to detail, ability to hyperfocus, intense special interests, strong pattern recognition, etc. some of which may be beneficial on traditional IQ tests and some of which may be detrimental. We may at some future date be able to untether autism from comorbid conditions that create poor quality of life for some autistic people without "curing" autism.

Autistic people tend to have spikey profiles - amazing at things they have invested their focused attention on and shockingly crap at things they haven't. Like Sherlock Holmes being able to identify what street a particularly type of mud comes from but not knowing that the earth revolves around the sun because it wasn't relevant to his interests. So depending on what the test is testing they may score well or poorly.

What makes a "good mutation"? It can be one that benefits the species as a whole rather than the individual which clearly having a certain percentage of people fascinated by breeding the best kind of wheat or figuring out how to make calendars or knocking different types of rocks together until they found a convenient and predictable way to make fire, or testing foods until they figured out which ones were poisonous or not.

Autistic people are also disproportionately queer and there's a theory that having queer people in a social group is an evolutionary advantage because having some people not burdened by childcare but focused on tasks that benefit the colony as a whole, provides advantages to those social groups.

I think a lot of the priests and priestesses, monks and nuns that transcribed and illuminated ancient texts were actually autistic and that that effort helped to preserve a lot of information that would otherwise have been lost. If you have sensory issues and are asexual (which again, a disproportionate number of autistic people are) then living in a quiet monastery and devoting yourself to copying texts sounds pretty fab.

So you're welcome Western Civilisation.