<p>The incidence of Autism in areas where highly intelligent, geeky Hi Tech Asperger-types have congregated in recent years [which includes the whole bay area, but the south bay in particular] has soared, in comparison with the general population of the country.</p>
<p>So they think that engineers and smart people have few social skills</p>
<p>And to blame womens lib seems ridiculous…women have always been smart, women have always be intellectual, but have not always had the opportunities</p>
<p>I find it offensive to blame a movement for something that is physical with a child</p>
<p>To blame women’s lib is pathetic</p>
<p>Unfortunately, ““women’s lib defensiveness”” and other forms of similar behavior could interfere with legitimate research to better understand the epidemic of autism spectrum diagnoses. </p>
<p>No one is BLAMING women’s lib for anything. Women’s lib is not the culprit. The culprit appears to be the genetic pooling of similar cognitive and social styles such that what in one generation is a mild human variation in the next generation becomes amplified. </p>
<p>In the work I do, where increasingly it seems I am in the position of telling parents that their child has an ASD, there is no rush to blame, only to understand and cope and intervene. </p>
<p>Understanding that social phenomena might have evolutionary and genetic consequences might be a bit of a tangent of thinking for some, but it resonates in the real world…at least in mine.</p>
<p>Good response, robyrm. I doubt the scientist was out to slander women’s lib; rather, he was probably putting forth a provocative theory that was based on some amount of observations - much like Larry Summers. To callously reject his statements because you don’t like what he said (NJres, CGM…) is, in my opinion, misguided.</p>
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<p>That’s exactly the point. From what I understand of the snippets, what is being proposed is the following:</p>
<hr>
<p>Today, with more women in science and engineering fields, the probability of encounters between people with autistic traits has increased. Holding the probability that someone has the needed genes constant, the number of offspring with the trait will necessarily increase. </p>
<p>Using some made up and largely exaggerated numbers and non-rigorous probabilities: </p>
<p>The chance that someone has genes that may be expressed as autism in offspring is low. If an engineering group of 100 has 1 woman, and that 1 woman has a child with 1 man in that class, the chance that the child has autism will be very low. After all, the woman has to have the gene AND the man has to have the gene. With 99 men, there’s a good chance that she can find one…but assuming randomness it’s not expected.</p>
<p>In a group of 100 engineers, if there are 50 men and 50 women, and each woman has a child with one corresponding man, the chance that at least 1 pair will have an autistic child is much greater. As a result, the numbers should be greater here.</p>
<h2>You can run this with real numbers if you want…it’ll work out.</h2>
<p>This isn’t necessarily to say that I’m convinced lib is a good reason…not without actually reading more than a summary of a radio show and a Wired article. I just wanted to clarify what I thought the program suggested.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>The number of autistic kids in Silicon valley wouldn’t be an issue if there weren’t professionals to report it. If we’re looking for someone to blame, I say blame the pediatricians (especially the female ones).</p>
<p>I stormed this thread with my flaming torch held high, in the best of angry villager traditions (see old Frankenstein movie). Now that I’ve posted, I’ll slip through the drawbridge into the castle and defend myself against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, rotten tomatoes, Greek fire, anything else you want to fling.</p>
<p>I think Cheers was obviously being humorously provocative with her choice of title. But her summary of the BBC program:
immediately brought The Bell Curve to mind, because of its similar premise.</p>
<p>NYMo2, as ITM pointed out, the book is a tome; had I been their editor, I would have told them to come back when they had separated it into the three (at least) books it should have been–I guess that’s what you get when you have two Harvard professors working on one book. But in a nutshell, the book argues: </p>
<p>Intelligence (as measured by IQ) is heritable; </p>
<p>The number of college applicants increased dramatically over the course of the 20th century, skyrocketing in the latter half; </p>
<p>The increasing selectivity of colleges led to sorting by IQ, combined with the elite colleges all going co-ed, combined with female graduates entering the work force in large numbers and marrying/having children later has led to a “propensity to mate by cognitive ability;” </p>
<p>Meaning that high-IQ individuals (of both sexes) are less likely than they once were to be randomly interpersed by marriage and occupation throughout the larger society, leading to a concentration of cognitive ability in what begins to resemble a “caste.”</p>
<p>I don’t know much about autism, its heritability, or its tendency to manifest in any particular brain type, but it’s essentially the same theory.</p>
<p>menloparkmom, I don’t think anyone was treating autism as a humorous subject. If you read the original post, it comes across as yet another instance of “women’s lib” being blamed for all social ills, and yet another characterization of scientists as anti-social and emotionally limited. The first idea crops up periodically, and the caricature of scientists/mathematicians comes up constantly. It doesn’t usually bother me, but at the moment its on my mind, as my 13-year-old son was recently mocked, by a teacher, no less, for being scientifically and mathematically talented.</p>
<p>None of us criticized any scientific results just because we didn’t like them. There is so little information in the original post that it was not possible to evaluate the science. </p>
<p>I had no idea that there has been an increased incidence of autism in Silicon Valley because of the concentration of high-tech “Asperger types”. High-tech engineers are not scientists, and in my very extensive experience, scientists are not particularly likely to be anti-social. </p>
<p>It’s certainly true that social advances can have unforeseen ill effects. The information on this thread about the increased incidence of autism in Silicon Valley, and the idea of “sorting by IQ” from The Bell Curve via driver, is new to me and quite interesting. It may be that “mating by cognitive ability” is analogous to inbreeding.</p>
<p>I’m wondering, though, driver, if the scenario you outline falls apart because so many people lack opportunity. As the potential for highly intelligent individuals to advance in social class via education diminishes in our society, wouldn’t the concentration of raw cognitive ability in the upper classes decrease?</p>
<p>Oh geez. And I thought it was the Tupperware in the microwave that was causing it.</p>
<p>
Yes, I think that was the point of the BBC program, and that it has good and bad potential results. There was a reason (beyond taboo) that the marrying of first cousins isn’t allowed.
I don’t agree with your first point at all, but that’s probably a subject for a different thread. TBC’s point wasn’t so much to do with traditional social or economic class. They argue that the vastly increased opportunity (and tendency) for the brightest students to go to college–and, with coeducation, marry each other, and reproduce–created a “brain drain” in the rest of society–i.e., a partitioning of society by IQ that hadn’t occurred before.</p>
<p>Here’s an excerpt from TBC that first appeared in The Wall Street Journal a year before the book came out, and what first caught my attention. You know, many people new to this forum often comment on the rarified atmosphere here at CC–consider this example, and think about it.
So anyway (and I hope this isn’t considered a hijack–I think the subject is germane to the OP), the authors go on to posit that co-education combined with increasing selectivity==people of similar intellect marrying each other and begatting similar progeny at a much greater rate than has happened in recent American history–to the benefit of society in some respects, but to the detriment of society in that their are fewer high-IQ people reproducing in the non-college population. Which produces what they call a “Cognitive Elite,” and if I may say so (uncritically), I see a lot of evidence of that here.</p>
<p>Gee my list of 12 must be about 1 in 10 billion. Food for thought!</p>
<p>Interesting comments, driver. In my view, the possibility of forming a “cognitively elite caste” that drains other levels of society of high-IQ individuals depends on a great deal of mobility in society. By this I mean that individuals who have DNA that codes for high intelligence have access to all that is needed in order to make it to college. This includes, at a minimum, pre-natal medical care and good nutrition for the mother, a reasonably stable family life, good nutrition and appropriately stimulating activities during childhood, absence of exposure to toxic substances like lead, access to good schools, a belief that academic success is possible for oneself. If you doubt the importance of this last factor, look at the success of the programs by which a philanthopist “adopts” an inner-city elementary school class, promising to fund college education for all qualified students. We may disagree on whether these conditions exist for most people in this country. I believe that mobility was increasing until about 1980, and has been decreasing since then, and continues to decrease. But this is tangential to your point that a concentration of intellectual ability has occurred recently; clearly it has, and I had never thought about it before. The excerpt from TBC is very interesting. I’m not so sure about the degree to which the potential for high intelligence is lacking outside this group; presumably, a person with DNA coding for high intelligence (whatever that means) who does not achieve high intelligence because of, e.g., lead exposure, will still pass on those high-IQ genes to offspring. </p>
<p>I have to run now, but I’ll offer this wonderful quote from Stephen Jay Gould: “I am somewhat less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”</p>
<p>In a related story, the increased popularity of breast-feeding has led to an increase in Rickets. The reason is mom’s stuff is not quite as complete as touted and you need Vitamin D supplements.</p>
<p>NYMo2:
Stephen Jay Gould was in the vanguard of the critics decrying his Harvard colleagues’ book, 12 years ago. The quote that you cite, however, demonstrates that he had completely missed their point. As to your other points, the authors didn’t claim that no people–even a large number of people–ever fell through the cracks. Just that there was a demonstrable trend of high-IQ people marrying each other and reproducing, largely due to college selectivity, and that that was changing current society. And, I’m sure I missed some of your points, as I have to run off now, too. 
Later!</p>
<p>I was waiting to see if anyone could explain this quote by Lefthandofdog but I guess not…</p>
<p>“The number of autistic kids in Silicon valley wouldn’t be an issue if there weren’t professionals to report it. If we’re looking for someone to blame, I say blame the pediatricians (especially the female ones).”</p>
<p>Really?</p>
<p>As for the ‘lack of dispersal of high intellect’ issue…rest assured that there are still very few places in the world where this is anything approaching a reality, if in fact it is a ‘problem’ in your neighborhood… Thinking ‘outside the beltway’ a bit is in order.</p>
<p>I was trying to be facetious. Sorry. But there is something to the idea that it takes ‘reporters’ to point out a phenomenon (rise in autistic population in this case). It doesn’t mean that the phenomenon didn’t exist in the past with the same frequency, just that it might not have been picked up. If a court is flooded with civil rights suits, does that mean that there’s an actual increase in c.r. violations, that a lawyer with an interest in c.r. has just opened a practice, or that there’s new legislation?</p>
<p>i don’t buy this theory at all personally.</p>
<p>also, since vitamin D comes from the sun, if we didn’t have to protect babies from UV due to pollution they could get plenty. breast milk is always best if possible… but i don’t think see how it’s related…</p>
<p>The autism spectrum has been broadened by redefinition of the scope in the last 11 years with the addition of the ‘Asperger’ classification. This has increased ‘reported statistics’ for sure. Genuinely, I think everyone is trying to decide if there is more to it than that, but I would have to say the consensus is that the answer is yes. Forget about Pediatricians, ask anyone you know who works in special education. I tried to hold to the ‘we are just labeling it it now, it was always there’ theme for as long as I could justify it, but the last few years have been shattering my resolution, honestly…way more quirky kids out there- particularly in certain subpopulations.</p>
<p>About the Bell Curve, everybody got up in arms, for obvious reasons, about what the book said about blacks. So why was it rarely mentioned that the book also said Jews have higher average IQs than Caucasian non Jews?
I never heard autism was more prevalent in “smart” people’s children, either. Hmmm.
Great pun, thedad.</p>
<p>barrons, I’d like to see the source of that tidbit on breastfeeding…</p>
<p>I guess I might even be willing to run the risk of rickets if I was standing on the safe side of the line for lymphoma, arthritis, diabetes, breast cancer, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, etc. Oh yeah and a substantial IQ bump too.</p>