Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
I am so tired of these sorts of articles. Even in a piece proposing that &quot;autism is based on genes that are 70,000 years old and we are basically pattern seekers&quot; they fail to really make the point &quot;Maybe it isn&#x27;t, per se, a defect at all.&quot; I imagine the author is going for that, but the article doesn&#x27;t really get there. The article comes across like &quot;Autistic guy likes his defect and wants to prettify it by claiming it&#x27;s a <i>feature</i> not a <i>bug</i> (while we snicker up our sleeves behind his back).&quot;<p>When do I get to see some headlines asking &quot;Are they really defective? Or did the world just go and get all busier and noisier than in the past while humans kind of mostly stayed the same?&quot;<p>Re <i>sensory issues</i> (which are often associated with ASD):<p>My parents couldn&#x27;t stand noise. They were tyrannical about keeping things quiet so they could sleep.<p>No one accused them of being <i>autistic.</i> They were just <i>old</i> and <i>set in their ways</i> and spent all or part of their childhoods on a farm where things were quieter than the modern world.<p>Kids used to be called <i>shy</i> if they weren&#x27;t social butterflies. Now we take them to a specialist and get them labels like <i>autism</i> and <i>selective mutism</i> and treat them like defective weirdos.<p>Not everyone is a social butterfly. The human race was never mostly social butterflies.<p>Also also: social skills are learned behaviors. If kids get less attention from other people and spend all their time staring at a TV or something instead, is it really shocking that they don&#x27;t have much social savvy these days? Won&#x27;t this show most obviously in those kids who innately need to work at it to learn it and don&#x27;t naturally soak it up like a sponge?<p>(Edited because autocorrect is sometimes an annoying butt.)