With the reemergence of estrogen as a player, neoteny allowing the exercise of estrogen inclinations, perhaps we’ll see the kind of explosion of possibility your are suggesting.

Just found your piece at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/2009/10/autism-aspergers-neurodiversity.html. Thank you!

Andrew

I have scoped out your project, somewhat, and am appreciative. I have no direct connection to autism (aside from claiming it when I need to excuse a social gaff), but it’s a topic that comes up often. My wife is a former public school special-ed teacher, and she continues to teach at a religious school. She has worked with kids who bring all kinds of temperaments to class.

As we compare notes about the people in our lives, we’ve noticed for some time that there is an uninterrupted spectrum from statistical social normalcy to extreme autistic reclusiveness. There are no clear demarcations, but a gaydar-like perceptiveness can pick up subtle vibes when people are slightly off. (We’ve not talked much, as I think about it, about the other end of the spectrum. That path I guess culminates in its own social extreme of chronic in-your-face gregariousness and a space-invading compulsion to touch. Evidently, those people travel in their own circles.).

Maybe autism is a label for a particular clumping of tendencies within the broader sweep of the pandemic of psychological syndromes and disorders. No doubt the pharmaceutical industry plays a role in the coining of new mental and behavioral maladies, but on the face of it there seems to be an explosion of neurodiversity in the current generation of children. OCD, ADHD, bipolar, autism/Aspergers (how about peanut allergies?) and other clumps significantly shape the psychographic profile of this generation. Maybe these tendencies were always present in the population at their current levels, but, for sociocultural or medical-diagnostic reasons, did not attain much visibility. Now, there are no secrets.

You position autism as the, or an, evolutionary avant-garde. I’m not sure it stands out from the pack so conspicuously. The whole gamut of neurodiversities might represent the leading edge.

You promote accommodation rather than invasive therapy when it comes to autism/Asperger, and I suppose the same consideration should be extended to the whole gamut (Down with Neurophopes!). In practical terms, I can’t fathom how the gamut is to be accommodated. We, or the next generation, might observe whether the current explosion of neurodiversity is adaptive (timely) or maladaptive (premature).

Or, moving from the practical to the theoretical, have you considered the postmodern neurodiversity explosion as a psychological version of the Cambrian explosion of biodiversity? All kinds of critters arrived suddenly on the scene about 530 million years ago, giving natural selection a trove of resource material to work with. Needless to say, countless of the new species remained extant only briefly. The fittest begat phyla still with us.

This is probably redundant with material you’ve posted, but it might be that evolution will cull most of the new neurological phenotypes, and, though all might have neotenous roots, natural selection will favor relatively few, and those few will set the stage for a shift in humankind’s evolutionary trajectory. See, Founder Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect