An Autist, a Sociopath, and an ADHD'er Walk Into a Bar...

Hey, Astyanax! Thanks for stopping by, it's always a treat to have you.

Furthermore, two hundred years – and I think we can safely assume that the critical frame conditions did not exist very much earlier than that, except perhaps in monasteries – is just eight generations. That is a mere eyeblink of evolutionary time. Even runaway sexual selection takes longer than that – on the order of a hundred generations, I believe – to fix a characteristic in a significant segment of a population.

Mm, eight generations is precisely all that would be necessary, albeit under controlled conditions. Are you familiar with this experiment? It was demonstrated that the desirable traits were fixed eight generations out. Also occurring in the eighth gen? Weird "piggyback" traits: curly tails, variegated coats, etc. These physical traits appeared to be inextricably tied to the "tameness" that was being selected for.

As for selection? Well, I mentioned above that I have no problems interfacing with someone else who isn't inclined to make eye-contact, make or read the correct facial expressions, or employ indirect communication. In fact, I've been happily dating a fellow Autist for a couple of years now. Not that we're likely to produce a socially awkward rugrat anytime soon, but it at least demonstrates a potentially operative principle.

One last comment. I appear to be, so far, the only person posting on this thread who has, as far as he knows, no personal experience of these conditions. Allow me to say what a joy it is to come upon a thread in which every post is lucid, free of spelling errors and barbaric internet abbreviations. There certainly appears to be something to be said for autism.

Speaking of piggyback traits; sociopathy is accompanied by an irremediably feeble grasp on grammar, geometry, and drawing. Makes u wunder, dsnt it, lol.

A flag for your thread and a star for your post, mistermonculous.

Thanks, and a star for you, sir.

reply to post by varikonniemi

What you probably would consider autistic or ADHD are the extreme cases. What i see as the possible "next trait of humanity" are the borderline/highly functioning cases. In all evolution it can be clearly seen that every change is an trade-off. Therefore too much or too little change in any direction is not good – not even with autism/ADHD.

Unfortunately that isn’t how evolution works. A partly developed trait can provide a survival advantage, certainly, but it will be small and it will take thousands of years to show any real difference. Evolution is a very slow process, and the cultural conditions in which people with autism, etc., can function have only been around for a few generations.

Sexual selection can cause a trait to develop faster. But are people with autism and related conditions more attractive to members of the opposite sex than people without these conditions? I made this point earlier, and so did snarfbot. It is a simple, basic and, I think, fatal objection to the OP’s thesis.

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Is the definition of successful reproduction raising your child to become an adult, or just to have a child?

The definition (I quote Richard Dawkins here) is to become a grandparent.

Anyhow, it seems you are drastically wrong since the amount of "those people" has seen an MASSIVE increase in only 50 years.

I believe this has to do with a redefinition of what is meant by ‘autistic spectrum disasters’. As I said earlier, it probably has more to do with cultural fashions than a real increase in numbers of people with the condition.

reply to post by Astyanax


Quantify, "very slow" please.

There are factors which can accelerate the process.

It seems that both gradual evolution, and sudden evolution happen throughout the span of time.

It depends.

Originally posted by varikonniemi

Originally posted by snarfbot
the only way that could possibly be true was if those people were more successful reproducers.

what are the statistics regarding the above subsets of the population, and their offspring, my gut tells me that it would be a negative correlation.

Is the definition of successful reproduction raising your child to become an adult, or just to have a child?

Anyhow, it seems you are drastically wrong since the amount of "those people" has seen an MASSIVE increase in only 50 years.

(lower iq and social status is linked to higher fertility - it is to compensate for increased mortality)

edit on 6-9-2011 by varikonniemi because: (no reason given)

edit on 6-9-2011 by varikonniemi because: (no reason given)

Oh dear, I'm not sure I appreciate the unfounded correlation between these conditions and downward adjustment/stupidity. Though, if you've got them, please present the studies that show where poverty and low IQ intersect with a higher incidence per capita. Bet you can't.

The research I've read indicates that these conditions occur in all socio-economic spheres in the developed world. It must be noted however, that sociopaths do generally test lower than the average; and are unable to develop technical or aesthetic skill sets.

reply to post by Napalmvanity


I have a son with autism. There is a glimmer of hope and autism is a really broad range. The glimmer of hope is I have noticed significant improvement in social function with my son when he has a fever or otherwise gets sick. They are actually working on a drug that could simulate a fever without any symptoms. Many researchers think this improvement in social function during fever points to that autism is the result of some bacterial or viral issue and not entirely neurological.

Found an online review of the book I was mentioning

enjoy, although do realise the book is quite deep and this is just an persons take on it lol excuse the pun:

CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG.

(Comment on book by Joseph Chilton Pearce.)

Pearce claims that we can influence reality through our imagination. As infants we do not clearly differentiate reality and phantasy, and engage in what he calls “autistic thinking” – drawing on our inner sources only, not comparing our thoughts with those of other people, to attain “objectivity”. But as the child is socialized, he/she becomes immersed in the on-going common culture and starts thinking “rationally” and “objectively” like everyone else. Creative imagination dies. But different cultures have different “realities”, and none is any more “true” than another.

Each of us simply learns to select from the vast amount of information impinging on our senses from “out there” and focuses attention only on what we want to see or hear, or what our elders and our culture tell us we should select because it is “true”. What we select does obey certain physical laws; it is not wildly arbitrary. Later we discover (or invent?) these laws. However, the whole thought structure that emerges is not the only way to do it. An Australian Aborigine, for example, does it differently, takes another “cut” of the super-rich reality that is out there. We cannot take it ALL in, or we would be overwhelmed and unable to navigate in this richness, to find our ways of survival. All the “cuts” (selections), whether cultural or individual, obey natural laws peculiar to themselves, but they differ from each other. Each cut is an internally consistent system, but the different cuts are not always reconcilable with each other.

Hanneh Newcome "How Things Come Together"

Kind Regards,

Elf

reply to post by mistermonculous


While sociopathy does occur at all socioeconomic levels, it's much, much more prevalent among the poor and lower middle classes. Numerous studies are out there.

Here's a quicky that shows the correlation between socioeconomic status, and IQ:

Linky

I can feel the stupidity when I go to poor neighborhoods. You can observe it in the people..the way they drive, the way they talk, the way they act...completely different from the richer neighborhoods.

Originally posted by varikonniemi
Is the definition of successful reproduction raising your child to become an adult, or just to have a child?

in the strictest sense in terms of natural selection, creating the largest amount of reproductively viable offspring.

Anyhow, it seems you are drastically wrong since the amount of "those people" has seen an MASSIVE increase in only 50 years.

well autism for instance has become a sort of catch all diagnosis fairly recently, so of course, the numbers for that would appear to have increased, and children who are diagnosed with adhd today, would have just been considered rambunctious 50 years ago. that relates to another contention of mine, pumping unruly children full of powerful stimulants unnecessarily, but thats something for another thread.

so its more indicative of the current state of medicine, than a pandemic.

Both my daughters are Apies, & it's been a rough road not so much because of their diagnosis but because
of how cruel & nasty their peers tend to be. My girls are considered "gifted", my eldest has freaked me out with
what she knows & how she knows it. At 6 years old, she was muttering what turned out to be theorhetical physics. Yikes! My youngest has a photographic memory & is like a super sponge looking for more things to soak up & file in her memory banks. LOL My youngest starts middle school in 2 days & middle school is
usually pretty hard for Aspie kids because of how social it becomes. I sure hope I don't have to lose my mind on someone in the school district AGAIN....

My girls are like a mixture of the lead female character on the TV show Bones & Data from Star Trek the next generation. They're awesome kids & yes they don't fit in with their peer groups but considering how a vast majority of their peers behave as if they've escaped from the zoo, I'll take my misfit Aspie girls anyday.

Originally posted by unityemissions
reply to post by mistermonculous

 

While sociopathy does occur at all socioeconomic levels, it's much, much more prevalent among the poor and lower middle classes. Numerous studies are out there.

Hey, there. I've read quite a bit of material on the subject, and while there is a consensus that downward adjustment and it's co-commitant sheiss-y social conditions can be linked to poor parenting practices which in turn can lead to a higher incidence of anti-social behavior; I have NEVER found a study that asserts that the carriers of the heritable condition known as sociopathy occur at a higher rate among the poor.

In fact, I just did a pretty thorough search and found none of the studies which are purported (by you) to exist.

Here's a quicky that shows the correlation between socioeconomic status, and IQ:

I can feel the stupidity when I go to poor neighborhoods. You can observe it in the people..the way they drive, the way they talk, the way they act...completely different from the richer neighborhoods.

edit on 6-9-2011 by unityemissions because: (no reason given)

Since your evidence for the correlation was a personal anecdote, allow me to rejoin with my subjective experience of the same phenomena.

I know PLENTY of stupid rich people. Having been in the unique position to be exposed extensively to both social sets, I'd say that I encounter just about the same ratio of stupidity:intellegence in both populations. The differences lie not in inherent disparities, but are rather cultural in nature. Rich folks are better educated, better fed, and have a very different lexicon.

Originally posted by mistermonculous

Originally posted by unityemissions
reply to post by mistermonculous

 

While sociopathy does occur at all socioeconomic levels, it's much, much more prevalent among the poor and lower middle classes. Numerous studies are out there.

Hey, there. I've read quite a bit of material on the subject, and while there is a consensus that downward adjustment and it's co-commitant sheiss-y social conditions can be linked to poor parenting practices which in turn can lead to a higher incidence of anti-social behavior; I have NEVER found a study that asserts that the carriers of the heritable condition known as sociopathy occur at a higher rate among the poor.

In fact, I just did a pretty thorough search and found none of the studies which are purported (by you) to exist.

I don't understand your reasoning. Poor parenting practices, are linked to conscientiousness ( or rather lack there of), which is linked to IQ. IQ is strongly heritable. Do you not get at what I'm saying

The same goes for your reasoning regarding better educated, and better fed. I mean, don't you think that those with a more fit genome will choose to increase their fluid intelligence by increasing their economic status, so as to provide better education, and better food for their selves and their offspring?! I don't think the two are separable.

Also, sociopathy involves a genetic component, but needs an environmental component to be expressed.

I think what you're trying to refer to is essential psychopathy. That's a whole other story.

double post.

apologies.

reply to post by mistermonculous

And thank you, sir, for the star. My compliments to the lady autist.

In a case of selective breeding, a very few generations are required to fix a trait. That is because the breeders know what they are looking for. They breed animals or plants bearing the trait, or the beginnings of it, with one another. This fixes the trait relatively quickly. Selective breeding is genetic engineering done the old-fashioned way; most of the food we eat today comes from artificial animals and vegetables that are not known, and could not possibly survive, in nature.

Sexual selection can’t work as fast as that. First you need an accidental mutation. The trait expressed by it needs to be costly because it has to be an honest fitness advertisement – sexually selected traits are always ornaments or weapons. Individuals possessing them must be able to bear the trait, with its attendant costs, and still prevail in the struggle to survive and mate. For unless it is an honest advertisement, a trait sexually selected for will cause the population to grow less fit and eventually become extinct. It is all rather haphazard, if not exactly random, and takes enormously longer than the timescales on which selective breeding operates.

Your original hypothesis didn’t involve sexual selection, anyway, but something we might call cultural selection. It is a lot more like natural selection but could, I think, operate pretty quickly. For example, genocide could be an extreme and very rapid agent of cultural selection; imagine if a totalitarian state decided to eliminate all red-haired people, as in MIA’s famous video. It wouldn’t be more than a few generations before the genes for red hair disappeared from the population, even if a few red-haired people did manage to escape the clutches of the state.

But although this example demonstrates that cultural selection can operate over a generation or two, it also shows us how extreme and violent a cultural change would need to be in order for that to happen. Even if the factor was something relatively subtle like diet or lifestyle change, we would still see massive changes in the actuarial statistics. There have been changes, but they have been subtle and spread out over time. No cultural cataclysm has killed off all the ‘normal’ people, allowing autism-spectrum-condition-bearers to rule the Earth!

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Unity_emissions points out that cultural factors act on gene expression, causing certain traits (such as, perhaps, autism and Asperger’s syndrome) to appear with greater frequency than in the past. Ridley mentions this in the article you linked to, then goes on to talk of cultural selection, the implication being that some of these newly-appearing traits might be selected for. I think this is a fair enough supposition, but by this model of argument it is dozens of generations too early to tell what might be being selected for by contemporary cultural factors.

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There are two more factors to consider, and they have opposite effects. The first is globalization. The second is innovation.

Globalization is thought of as cultural homogenization. It has been said that the greatest variety among human cultures existed in the late 1400s, just before European imperial expansion kicked off the process of globalization. Since that time, anthropologists argue, Western cultures have been penetrating and modifying other local cultures, creating an increasingly uniform world. I am not sure that I agree with this – from what I have observed (and mine is a first-hand perspective), the collision of East and West invariably results in the creation of something new, further diversifying culture rather than homogenizing it. The English language has killed off or endangered many other languages, but English itself now exists in numberless local variations. Still, it is true that modern capitalism has turned the peoples of the world into so many identikit worker/consumer ants, and that a few Western cultural artefacts, for example the equal-temperament musical scale, are today more ubiquitous even than English.

The other factor is innovation, which drives cultural change, and seems to be driving it faster and faster all the time. This, too, is connected with capitalism, which is often described as a process of creative destruction. Change in contemporary culture, driven by innovation and its mistress fashion, is now frantic and unremitting. It seems to me that civilization is now mutating so fast that culturally-driven change in the human genotype cannot occur; the driving and fixing factors are too short-lived.

Having said all this, however, I am obliged to add that none of us can really be sure quite what is happening. We are too close to the situation; indeed, we are the situation.

reply to post by unityemissions

Quantify, "very slow" please.

I already did, for sexual selection.

Perhaps you would like to present some of the information on which you base your criticisms, and then we can discuss technicalities that are in any case extraneous to the main line of discussion here. This is a civilized thread and I would like to keep it that way.

Incidentally, I follow the mainstream of contemporary evolutionary biology in regarding punctuated equilibrium as a nonexistent or negligible element in evolutionary theory.

I don't understand your reasoning. Poor parenting practices, are linked to conscientiousness, which is linked to IQ. IQ is strongly heritable. Do you not get at what I'm saying

Possibly not. As far as I can tell you fail to draw any distinction between acquired deviations and genetic conditions, and then proceed to make a distastefully biased, unsubstantiated correlation between poverty and sociopathy. It would appear that you are using a pseudo-scientific argument to justify your palpable disdain for the poor.

Also, sociopathy involves a genetic component, but needs an environmental component to be expressed.

Not disputed. However, folks who exhibit behaviors which match those associated with sociopathy can be falsely conflated with those who have the biological condition itself. We are not discussing acquired deviations, but heritable ones.

You are perhaps correct in assuming that adverse cultural conditions would result in negative selection. But the way you present this concept is ill-founded, muddy, and slightly sinister.

I think what you're trying to refer to is essential psychopathy. That's a whole other story.

I assure you I'm not, and yeah, it is.

reply to post by mistermonculous


Okay, you choose to remain ignorant.

Fine.



edit:

you don't even make any sense. We're not discussing acquired, but heritable, and then you go on to say that sociopathy involves both a genetic and environmental component.

HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?

Originally posted by unityemissions
reply to post by mistermonculous

 

Okay, you choose to remain ignorant.

Fine.

edit:

you don't even make any sense. We're not discussing acquired, but heritable, and then you go on to say that sociopathy involves both a genetic and environmental component.

Fair enough. To clarify: Sociopathic behavior, whether folks have the marker or not, must have a certain set of social and environmental factors in place before it can be expressed. I made the point that anti-social behavior is not necessarily a result of a genetic condition, but does require in both cases a certain set of circumstances in order to manifest.

Let's say a crooked investment banker and a house-breaker share the same marker for sociopathy. The difference lies mostly in where each has access to certain resources; but also in the way they each recognize opportunity: one lives very comfortably, the other ends up in prison. One simply has a better capacity to identify opportune circumstances than the other.

Edit to add: I think it's pretty well established that environmental factors aggravate biological conditions, and therefore fail to recognize the contradiction in my reasoning.



Edit to add-add: The wiki link you appended to your original post still fails to substantiate the argument that the genetic condition is more prevalent in impoverished populations, merely that criminal behavior is more common. Which was never in dispute. I hope I demonstrated in the above example that the genetic condition is perhaps less likely to be detected in the higher tax brackets, due to its being expressed in more favorable circumstances.

reply to post by Astyanax


Thanks for the fact-banquet, mang.

Also, to all the parents that have posted, thanks very much for contributing! It's awesome to have your input.

reply to post by MischeviousElf


Interesting stuffs, many thanks.

I read one dude who asserts that UFO's are a corporealized mass-hallucination, and he uses similar arguments to those presented in the quote. Fun to think about.

reply to post by Astyanax


Hi, Astyanax, thanks for taking up all the vowels including Y.

I loved your primary post and I hope to catch up on everything here but I am running like the devil this morning.

Just wanted to say that you forgot to include what is being called (Ecological) Adaptive Speciation. And it made me think of this song...






You can't tell us apart anymore.