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Is autism the next human evolution?

Aspie_With_Attitude

Aspie_With_Attitude

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
A little while ago I did a YouTube video on my autistic YouTube Creator channel sparking a debate whether autism is the next human evolution or not. I didn't have much to say since I truly believe autism had been around since the dawn of time, 4-5 million years ago to be exact. I even believe that autism was definitely around in Ancient Greece maybe to suggest Pythagoras was autistic.


If you're interested in watching my video, this is where I have my say. If the videos isn't for you, I even made an autistic memes about that subject including a selfie.

InstagramE41.jpg
 
Usually if it favors the entity vs environment in time the non autistics will die out and autists remain. In our days thats no longer possible but lets theorize about the past. Wait, the past has already happened. Guess the result is they can survive about as well as nons.

If youre refering to interest job as successful ppl, depends on their interest and its requirement on the market nowadays, as well as how it requires socializing and whether it matches that persons social skills.

There are many factors, autism by itself is not too change making, it can be a disadvantage or advantage.

Autism has survived, changed the world times and times again, and it may require more thought and planning in order to fit in and be successful, but despite this, it has made it.
 
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It helps more if you think of evolution as lineages and not species as in the latter sense it loses its meaning.

Lineages diverge through decent with modification (and other factors not as well understood so not worth noting here) but species do not. Naming species in the past is only an exercise which can be done in retrospect. Divergence is quite a bit more complicated than: take organism + time (generations) = new organism.

Multi lineages and gene flow between them help one understand how so many different conditions exist within humanity. It's generally an exercise in reductionism to try to identify unique and completely common human traits. Genetic material is extremely diverse and not uniformly distributed.
 
No. They used to say that we were eventually going to lose our appendix because they were no longer needed - then discovered the reason the appendix is actually needed. All the genes that are in existence right now are the genes that have been here since the creation and the genes that will continue to be here to the end.
 
The 'autism is the next step in evolution' theories are founded on an embarrassing lack of understanding of how evolution works... I dearly hope that anyone with a GCSE or above in biology wouldn't believe such rubbish, but alas I don't have that much faith in the education system or the average persons intelligence.
 
This is quite the opposite actually, autism and asperger may very much likely be traits that are deeply in our dna since the beginning.

The funny thing that comes to my mind is that only an aspie could spend minutes hitting rocks together to make a fire realy...

And the paradox we live nowadays is that, our way of life increases autism risk, this is sure.

But the number and the awarness around autism actually increases because our society is less and less comptatible with autism, this is counter intuitive but think about it, we learn we have autism and we suddenly realise that our family members may very much likely be aswell on the spectrum.

So the 3 generations prior to me where just undiagnosed because they didnt had any problem with their life and they had children.

Me on the other hand, I got diagnosed when I couldnt handle my life anymore and I'll probably spend my life alone.

I see myself more as a remnant of the stone age than the next step of anything.

In conclusion our society creates more autism but also make autism harder to deal with on a daily basis.We may very much likely have a big problem in a few years regarding that matter.

A French autistic guy wrote a book with a similar title.(And this guy was non verbal as a kid but now he passes as an NT)
I dont think people saying that are honest, they are just trying to get people's attention with a catch phrase.
 
Doesn't modern society override evolution? Evolution is the theory that traits required to survive become widespread over time, if I understand correctly. Particular traits are not needed to survive. It's been replaced with technological evolution, I think. If we want to guess the "next step," it'd be something involving technology, such as the chips installed I've heard mentioned somewhere at some point.
 
For it to be a step in evolution, there would have to be a threat that NDs have a higher chance of surviving than NTs. I don't see any such threat.

I think the mix of NT and ND is actually an advantage to the species as a whole. The NTs natural tendency to copy behaviors preserves practices which help the species. The NDs different perspective (and sometimes inability to copy behaviors), can occasionally lead to discovering new solutions and more advantageous behaviors. Together they form a system that preserves good solutions and allocates a little energy toward finding better ones.

I don't see a species of 100% NTs or 100% NDs doing better than we are now.
 
I know that occasionally such ideas pop up, but I think that the whole idea of autism being more common than it used to be is like @Iamnotarabot said, that modern society is increasingly less accommodating to autistics.

For most of known human history, humans were either hunter-gatherers or farmers. A lone aspie wandering far from the traditional tribal hunting zone might discover a better source of food that is not being utilized. An aspie in a farming culture who has the weather patterns for his village for the past 100 years memorized would obviously be a real asset to his community.

Today the latter aspie collects a "disability" pension and stays in his room with his weather knowledge scrawled on the walls and reading old farmers almanacs, and everybody thinks he's weird. The former aspie wanders away from home and suddenly the regional search and rescue team is hunting for him and hoping he doesn't get run over by a car or fall into the river.

The thing that's changed is not us, it's our environment. Society is increasingly narrow in skills valued, the only thing that's really valued is social manipulation with the goal of making large amounts of money to spend on various status items. Sociopaths and manipulators rake in billions of dollars while everybody else lives on the streets.
 
The "that's not how evolution works" argument has been done so I won't cover that ground. We are slaves to our genes, whoever we are. Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" really should be required reading in schools. He may be a bit of an outspoken twonk with controversial opinions on politics and religion these days, but he's written some excellent books.
Human evolution has been slowed to a virtual halt, at least temporarily, thanks to medicine which is ever improving. The autistic population is likely to increase by proportion because more of us get a chance to reproduce and pass our genes on to the next generation. As neurodiversity inevitably becomes an accepted reality rather than a fringe concept that will only increase.
We will never be in the majority though. The challenge for those of us who believe in a neurally diverse future is to not only understand within ourselves how much we need allistics, but in helping allistics understand how much they need us in their world.
 
No. I think the next logical step would be more along the lines of Hallucigenia. But with eyes. Oh and a mouth so we can still smoke cigars.

hallugenia.jpg
 
Autistamatic said:
The "that's not how evolution works" argument has been done so I won't cover that ground. We are slaves to our genes, whoever we are. Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" really should be required reading in schools. He may be a bit of an outspoken twonk with controversial opinions on politics and religion these days, but he's written some excellent books.
Human evolution has been slowed to a virtual halt, at least temporarily, thanks to medicine which is ever improving. The autistic population is likely to increase by proportion because more of us get a chance to reproduce and pass our genes on to the next generation. As neurodiversity inevitably becomes an accepted reality rather than a fringe concept that will only increase.
We will never be in the majority though. The challenge for those of us who believe in a neurally diverse future is to not only understand within ourselves how much we need allistics, but in helping allistics understand how much they need us in their world.
Click to expand...

Autistic people do not necessarily have autistic children and the opposite is true as well. The genetic mechanism for autism is not understood well. It is likely a cascading effect. This would in fact remove it from selective pressures. There are many other factors in evolution. Much of it is happenstance. The utility of certain features do not dictate their appearance in the absence of extreme selective pressures. When something is the result of a cascading effect of genetic material the carriers of this material are, in most cases, not affected by that material.

In other words NTs are trading this material back and forth within the gene pool and, very uncommonly, it leads to an autistic condition. It really doesn't matter if the autistic person procreates or not, their non-autistic relatives carry the genes too. They also pass them on to other lineages where no autism had previously existed. If it combines correctly there........once again autistic children who would not need to reproduce for the syndrome to live on.

This is an example of a condition which could not come to dominate the gene pool. It's an outlier and destined to stay that way.
 
HidinginPlainSight said:
Autistic people do not necessarily have autistic children and the opposite is true as well. The genetic mechanism for autism is not understood well. It is likely a cascading effect. This would in fact remove it from selective pressures. There are many other factors in evolution. Much of it is happenstance. The utility of certain features do not dictate their appearance in the absence of extreme selective pressures. When something is the result of a cascading effect of genetic material the carriers of this material are, in most cases, not affected by that material.

In other words NTs are trading this material back and forth within the gene pool and, very uncommonly, it leads to an autistic condition. It really doesn't matter if the autistic person procreates or not, their non-autistic relatives carry the genes too. They also pass them on to other lineages where no autism had previously existed. If it combines correctly there........once again autistic children who would not need to reproduce for the syndrome to live on.

This is an example of a condition which could not come to dominate the gene pool. It's an outlier and destined to stay that way.
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The heritability of autism is estimated at around 95% so the "not necessarily" caveat doesn't make a significant difference I'm afraid.

The Heritability of Autism Spectrum Disorder
 
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