On Monday I listened to this radio story, of the highly-regarded Australian ABC radio show "Health Report".
Autism researchers from Canada and the US explain why they
do not believe in the idea of an "autism epidemic" and
don't believe that autism in general is caused by mercury or chemical poisoning.
The ideas of "the intergenerational transmission of additive genetic influences" and "assortative mating" are explained.
A test of autism traits, that can be applied to members of the general population to detect the rate of autistic traits in individuals is mentioned.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/st...19796.htm#
This part of the show I found particularly interesting
Norman Swan: So of course one of the environmental things could be that couples are attracted to each other because they found somebody who has the same peculiar way of identifying with the world.
John Constantino: We could test that and we did. And it turned out that the correlation between parents for autistic trait scores are just as high as for brothers and sisters. So this underscores the whole notion of preferential mating for these traits and we certainly view it as a preliminary finding and one that will require replication. But it is quite likely that there is a way in which individuals who are like one another, both in terms of social competence or relative social not so competence find each other and one of the ways that we found that, and this again, this is one of the advantages of using a general population sample, is you can ask the question of how many couples in your population could be categorised as mum and dad both in the upper quartile, mum and dad both in the lower quartile, or opposites.
Norman Swan: A mixed marriage.
John Constantino: A mixed marriage and the same type parents outnumber the mixed type parents by something like 4 to 1. So by chance if there was random mating that wouldn't happen. So there is a very strong inclination for these individuals, at least at the extremes to find each other.
Are marriage guidance counsellors aware of this phenonenon? Which type of couple is the most likely to split up? Do each of these types of relationships have certain characteristics or pitfalls? What kind of offspring are produced by "high social skills" couples? Are their kids more likely to be impaired in some way or unusual, as Baron-Cohen's sysyemizing theory might predict? Is Constantino's research compatible with Baron-Cohen's theories?