I would argue the same standardization that has raised IQ generally actually de-selects for geniuses in many caseswe spend a lot of time getting people to think and act a certain way and behave efficiently etc. Slate Star Codex was a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition, politics, and medicine. The Western world (taken to mean Europe and the Anglosphere) comprises roughly 1/6th of the global population, which means there should be about 125,000 Westerners who are both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic. (my son was a Caesarian delivery) but that was because his head (=brain?) The entire idea of a gene for intelligence is just as silly as a gene for running fast. There are genes which have lower-order effects, and intelligence or running are higher-order capabilities that emerge from the lower-order system in complex ways (indeed, theres probably several more layers than that.) This study finds lower heritability than the usual estimates (which are around 80% to 90%; the authors are embarrassed by this, and in a later study suggest they might just have been bad at determining who in their sample did or didnt have autism. >The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. Most of these seem to be related to social ability. Right, genes are NOT good or bad. Terrifyingly competent and motivated, shockingly good with people, and with few visible mental issues. His processing was below average. 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. He (I presume) seems to be a bad conversationalist, likely through lack of practice. This reminds me of something a past friend mentioned. (2) Genes associated with autism arent being selected for And since mental traits like intelligence, social aptitude, and self-control are the ones most likely to be selected for in society, it makes sense that our imbalances would primarily be mental. So the genes are a correlation but not a cause of the autism, which is due to factors incidentally related to the high IQ, for example the advanced age of the parents? Then why is there a genetic link? Figuring out the causes of neurotypicality in intelligent people would go a long way, but its hard even to measure how neurotypical a given smart person is. The normies were not spergs running emulations, theyd have the same confused look whenever we sperged-out about something that we had when they talked about sportsball. However, I couldnt beat the Sophomore at 130 who was my workout partner in the weight room and only had 5-10 lbs on me in most lifts. Why? As for genetics, well, my IQ is ~135, and my wifes is right there with me (~125). Meanwhile, placing people on the spectrum equalizes access to resources, including insurance coverage. Agree with your post, and especially with this part. This intelligence is shifted towards technical subjects. Im not suggesting this accounts for the high/low intelligence as the sample size was small. Also also, Crespi is one of those scientists who constantly has much more interesting theories than anyone else (eg), and this makes me suspicious. 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. When she was three, she had symptoms of autism. My parents were optometrists. But many do it for positive outcomes versus negative pressure, which is how I interpreted your question. 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. Gender dysphoria. Even if intelligence where a little lower we would have a lot more genius given the increase in population. Of course people like that exist. And that finds that only 15% have intellectual disabilities. Hes amazing! Coming up with elaborate speculations as to why a unitary autism would be characterized by wildly divergent and contradictory symptoms (like being very bright and perceptive and being completely non-verbal and unable to learn) just leads you further down the rabbit hole. This is true in a sense, but also alters what we mean by normal. or, most spicily: I.e. The odds of him actually having Narcissistic Personality Disorder or any kind of Autistic Spectrum Disorder are close to 0. Strongly agree. This gene developed in Africa, and can be seen as a fundamental reason for the transatlantic slave trade. Research suggests that there is an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. Indeed. Think about it this way: When most other people behave incomprehensible for you because they dont see the same emotional nuances and act on their impulses, it is hard to learn social customs, even though you theoretically have the potential to be very skilled socially. I always used to get one word wrong on purpose because I preferred the silver stars. Graph B is the same thing, but with people have have autism with intellectual disability. But they offer a way of grouping types of problem kids that has caught on. 9 hours ago View Detailed Check-in. They find that even autistic people without de novo mutations have lower-than-average IQ. Well, I think its certainly a reasonable possibility, which in my experience appears to be true, that beyond a certain point, intelligence either directly causes weirdness or is reliant upon it as a foundation. Each genes benefit is based on underlying assumptions about how the body works, and if you change enough of those assumptions, the entire edifice becomes a failure. Over the vast majority of the range of the main volume knob on the mixer (assuming the system is set up reasonably), more will be better. If we can isolate these genes for high intelligence theoretically we could duplicate them so that a person might be more certain to have both a normal gene and also a variant gene. Intelligence is clearly not a neat and predictable thing, at least beyond certain broad generalizations or thresholds. Virtually everything has a failure mode. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. and they seem just as likely to have unplanned children as less intelligent people with equally bad impulse control. There was definitely a sperg-normie dynamic on my last work team, all highly intelligent. I am not saying they have the full disorder (and no its not a partisan snipe, except to the extent that being very skeptical of the US bureaucratic class is partisan). Another, potentially related, possibility is that we are disproportionately likely to diagnose white kids with autism rather than other forms of mental disability. Some people can correctly identify the pitch of a single note played on the piano. Most are weird in the sense of having uncommon interests (reading history or science books or studying languages for fun, say), but most seem pretty normal in terms of personality and affect and such. These three buckets and a few other less important factors combine to determine autism risk for any individual. They all share the same hunger for mathematics, and if you get to know those who seem normal on the surface, you find out that they have some interesting hobbies as well. Overall scores could continue to rise due to the Flynn effect even as intelligence is being selected against on a genetic level, which is what the evidence is suggesting. And if you do have a more challenging child, youll have more energy to deal with it as a younger parent. More generally, to relate to those people around you who are also bright. Seems like it could apply if there were many genes of small but overlapping effect, so that one particular aspect of mental performance is sometimes pushed past the breaking point. > (which are around 80% to 90%; the authors are embarrassed by this, and in a later study suggest they might just have been bad at determining who in their sample did or didnt have autism. Its also a chapter of The 10,000 Year Explosion. This can lead to bullying and social isolation, which in the long term can cause depression and the failure to learn social customs. 3% confidence is far too large. Note that billionaires in America are still vulnerable to (using a topical example) wealth taxes, and abroad billionaires in Russia / China must play the cuddle up to Putin / Xi or die / get put in a camp game. And the extreme male brain hypothesis in that light might just be an artifact of a statistical consequence of GMV in that set of traits, as it could be less reproductively costly to have a less stable architecture for those types of parameters in males due to higher reproductive payoff of hitting one of those optimal configurations in terms of number of offspring, as well as lower individual investment. It wouldnt surprise me if whats perceived in higher order terms as stereotypically autistic might be a series of misses on such optimal targets, over- or under- shoots, and then you end up in a situation where a child has difficulty working out how to discard pareidolia from their mental model of the world say just because of a specific kind of synapse oversensitive in some particular way, or later they engage in repetitive behavior instead of altering their mental model to accommodate more unpredictable interactions because it appears more efficient to their brain to conserve the model because of the overstated unpredictability of the alternatives, et cetera. But even adjusting for these factors, the autism low intelligence correlation seems too strong to dismiss. What is going on? It turns out that giftedness can be quite a burden for children and teenagers, as not many of their peers can relate to them and vice versa. It could be one of the categorization problems Scott was talking about in Against Against Autism Cures. If youre not low-functioning but dont have strong enough autistic traits to be clearly a high-functioning autistic, you dont have autism youre just a little weird? It seems that a process like this could conceptually produce an artificial bimodal distribution, even if the traits arent bimodally distributed. But as mentioned before, autistic people themselves on average have lower intelligence. >They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. Also, if anything, it would be self-control thats being selected against by modern reproductive behaviors, not intelligence. So by comparison, I could imagine that theres a bunch of gene variants that increase limb length, and that if you have a certain number of these you get some nice Usain Bolt proportions that help you win races. Sample: literally the whole of scotland. I get to see what happens to those kids otherwise, they become adults who ace every math exam, but are unable to buy pants. focus on the denotations of words, not the emotional or social connotations. (Apologies for a machine metaphor that is certainly misleading, but better than anything else than I can think of.). For example, they may dislike the father for not doing enough when the kid is self-harming from overstimulation. None are autistic, but both boys were a little socially awkwardbasically a couple years behind their classmates in this area. autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high. Preoccupation with whats normal and whether you are normal is a sign of mediocrity in my experience (though its not terminal). (*) to complicate matters, in normal usage, Im autistic, but in many usages I wouldnt be described as having autism. James Comeys twitter and book are exactly what Id expect from a career civil service person. List 1 Avoids eye contact Doesn't smile Doesn't reach out to be picked up Rejects your efforts to calm, soothe, and connect Doesn't seem to notice or care when you leave them alone Cries inconsolably Doesn't coo or make sounds EDIT: We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. What led me to ask this is stories of people who were deaf from birth whod get cochlear implants as adults. Normal includes insecurities, anxieties, caring what other people think. I. Based on those two correlations, I would be very surprised if it didnt add up to a correlation between predisposition for autism and children later in life. 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. 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? Interestingly, this one addresses the P>V, and V>P subtypes and suggests: children with ASD did not show the commonly understood characteristic profile on the WISC either in terms of PIQ-VIQ discrepancy or in terms of peak skills on particular WISC subtests. I believe this is also the case for artificial neural networks, unless you are in pathological regimes that are too unstable to be useful.