Aspies For Freedom

Because we don't live in the movies, like if mad scientists figured out a way to make everyone shrink like Pat Kramer (Lily Tomlin)

Perhaps a part of the problem is that the construct of Asperger's is unclear, having been researched originally some 1/2 century ago by a Viennese scientist who collected a group of like personalities in a sort of "boy's home" only to observe the outcome many years later.

It could be that the model is wrong. Or, perhaps the model was derived as a catch-all category for those persons who couldn't be easily labelled and categorised. For example, in the U.S. the term PDD-NOS or {pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified was the category used until the 1990's. Surely, a whole category of people couldn't have been invented overnight, such as global warming couldn't just have begun last Friday.

I agree with you on the tribal point. However, hypothetically within every tribe there was an odd duck that perhaps was smarter, or operated in a more socially circumscribed manner.

It's hard to say that one type of personality evolved from another, or that the social type is less evolved, since there are always exceptions to every rule.

I believe that the Buddhists call this ying and yang. But there is a little of ying in yang, and a little of yang in ying!

I'm sort of pre-vole myself.

It may appear that society is becoming increasing competitive, complex, and urbanised. In some ways that makes us more social, and in some ways it doesn't. We become more isolated in our competition, more contentious, less attached to our community, and less sexually reproductive.

No, there is simply no evidence at all for this claim. Your views, however neat they fit into your worldview, are not scientific.

Also, aspies differ just as much as everyone else on religion, ethics, politics, wealth, and most every other area.

What?

We, as humans, are a social species; no point in denying it. We have been for the past 10, 20 million years, at least. There is nothing original about the AS personality type, and there are no AS values.

The fact that something is natural, does not make it good. Rape and murder is natural. So is altruism, to some extent.

We are who we are, and in a social species, we are abnormal. This does not in any way degrade us, but devising scientifically unsound hypotheses will not do us any good.

Come back when your ideas have been published in a peer-reviewed journal of biology.

Totally wrong. There is evidence that humanity has been social from the start, i.e., from before it diverged from the other primates.

Evidence, please.

Evidence, please.

Narcissism is something else entirely, and narcissists may well be very social and extroverted.

alright, I'll admit i jumped down your throat there.

but your comment about scientific journals?
that was waaay outta line.

i'll admit, i didnt stop and think before i posted,and i am also in the wrong here.
and i'll also admit i am somewhat predisposed to not give you the benefit of the doubt...why,i am not sure.
but i have noticed it,so i'll be curbing it

sorry

Alright, let my modify that comment. If you want to give your theory scientific credibility, you gotta publish in real journals.

Of course, you're welcome to present your ideas, as long as I am welcome to criticize them. That is how great ideas are born. Didn't mean to put anyone off this place

What discussion is this?

Totally disagree. I attack the points that are worth attacking. Since I disagreed with the entire post, I attacked the entire post.

Um...what?

You mean I need to learn how to sugar-coat the truth, and/or lie. I won't do either.

Basically, you presented a hypothesis but gave no reason for us to accept it: no evidence of any kind. The only thing it's got going for it is that it makes sense to you.

Your hypothesis goes against all of established science. Therefore, the burden of proof is on you to prove the scientific establishment wrong. To do so, you need to provide sound science. You haven't.

Therefore, your ideas, however appealing or not they might be, are unlikely to be true, and in any event we should not believe it on faith alone. If we did, we might as well believe the moon a cheese.

Oh, that might well be. But Autistic_Shoes was implying that narcissism was just a name someone made up for a specific type of AS, and I pointed out that narcissism is a different, unrelated (or at the very least distantly related) condition. Perhaps there are narcissistic aspies, just as there are aspies with ADHD, but just like ADHD isn't just a type of AS, narcissism isn't just a type of AS.

Please note that I'm talking about pathological narcissism, which is classified as a personality disorder. I don't think anyone would want to admit to having it without an official diagnosis, because pathological narcissists are pathologically egoistic, take advantage of others, crave enormous attention, and so on. The thing it has in common with AS (or at least some ideas of AS) is the lack of empathy (which I kind of contest, or at least, believe that it comes in degrees).

It's certainly conceivable to me. I won't believe Asperger's paper was based on eugenics unless I get a chance to see it, and I've searched, but I can't find it anywhere online. Have you got some quotes (WITH context)?

And in any case, how does that, even if true, prove your point?

I'm with EvilZakkie on this one. There's nothing that suggests autistics are any more likely to have children, or even as likely to procreate, as NTs.

A couple of points. First:

In a discussion on this board earlier, I asked how it could be that there's an almost constant population of homosexuals in society despite them (generally) not reproducing (well, at least not until modern technology with artificial insemination and whatnot came a long). I had naively ignored that a trait, however genetic it is, need not be apparent in any given phenotype. Genes can lay dormant for many generations; one common example is a gene that causes some deadly disease under special conditions but under other conditions protects from malaria.

One doesn't have to be overly social to have children, but it certainly helps. I cannot believe you think that a group of people characterized by impaired social understanding and lower social drives have as many or more children than do everyone else. It makes no sense at all. To spread your genes, you probably need to be in a relationship, at least nowadays, when contraception and abortions are easy to come by. To do that, you need to be possess some social skills. And especially when you consider the lower-functioning end on the spectrum (by lower functioning, I mean simply unable to function in daily life without substantial help)--how in the world do you suppose they can keep up with everyone else when it comes to spreading genes?

Even in Silicon Valley I doubt people on the spectrum procreate more than others, and that area is commonly thought to have an extremely high density of autistics compared to everywhere else.

Second, you mustn't so easily cross the is-ought gap. The Scottish philosopher David Hume noticed some centuries ago that many writers, when it comes to morality, make sudden, illogical jumps from what is, i.e., how matters are, to how things ought to be. This led him to issue a warning: be very careful when you try to go from is to ought. Some think it can't be done; I'm inclined to agree.

But anyway, this is what you do when you go from genetic traits to human value. That way lies Social Darwinism, the belief that society ought to be structured after natural selection: the survival of the fittest. Screw autistics, poor, and other people somehow disabled in the race for survival and glory: the best fit are the ones that ought to survive, and only them, for the betterment of society and the human race. I strongly believe this isn't what you think, in fact, I believe you think the opposite, but this is what can result from carelessly jumping across the aforementioned gap.

So, I'll agree with EvilZakkie: autism advocacy is about human rights, not about science or evolution.

Then again we can either not assume that autistics are unlikely to get children.

There are no doubt many autistics that get married and have children, but I think we can safely assume that people on the spectrum on average have less children.

First of all, paragraphs! They ease reading considerably.

Have a look at the "causes" section of the wikipedia entry; it has some references. Also, I don't think any serious autism researchers deny that there's a strong (how strong? dunno) genetic component.

Funny how you would deny that there is any good evidence to the contrary, yet allow personal anecdotes to be the evidence in favor.

And what possible evidence have you for this? How are infants supposed to be able to make these complex realizations that probably the average four/five-year-old wouldn't understand?

I also don't buy into this irrational/rational thing. Sure, emotions are often irrational, but there is a certain logic to the way human behavior betrays them. If not, NTs wouldn't be able to empathize or predict behavior. The difference is this: there's so much to keep track on that the only way to do it with the limited resources the human brain has, is subconsciously, intuitively. So in NTs whose intuitive ability to read the behavior of others is intact, this happens subconsciously. It is logical; only, there's so much information that we couldn't possibly do it consciously in the short timeframe before it becomes obsolete.

Consider the fact that normal humans can pretty accurately predict th trajectory of a ball flying towards or away from them (especially the former). The trajectory is very logical, rooted in the laws of physics, and on the macro level expressible by some elegant equations. But imagine a human that didn't have the intuitive ability to do this; imagine a human that, like autistics may have to do with reading social cues, would have to do all the predictions consciously. They would have to do estimates and predictions and observations and solve equations at a speed and accuracy far outweighing that of the smartest beings or the most extreme savants in the world. They would never be able to do it before the ball hit them or its target.

Which is to illustrate that even though something is logical, it might still be practically impossible to do it fully consciously. I very much believe this is the cas with social interaction.

Midlife crises have nothing in common with autistic traits except that they are both, according to you, caused by some devastating revelation.

I'm sorry, the evidence points more in the direction of the subconscious. I.e., the evidence says more or less that neither being NT nor autistic has anything to do with beliefs or realizations, but with neurology, and we do not (yet, anyway) decide how our brains are going to be put together. That is a function of genetics and environment. Sorry, no one group is smarter or has realized more of the Truth (not big T) than anyone else.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

You do know the difference between sympathy and empathy?

I think that is but a rationalization. Eye contact, again, is probably largely subconscious, so the reason you or I might have sub-par eye contact is less to do with our decision not to and more to do with our inability or the fact that it makes us uncomfortable (probably both, and they probably reinforce each other).

Also, let me postfix this by saying that everything above pertains to your ideas, not your person, and should be read as such.