In particular, the excess of alleles associated with higher intelligence and educational attainment was only observed in the higher functioning categories (particularly Aspergers syndrome and individuals without comorbid intellectual disability) and not in the other/unspecified PDD and intellectual disability categories. (Is that still seen as credible? Every autism case is caused by some combination of these three factors, and the more it is caused by normal genes, the more intelligence is likely to be preserved (~100% confidence), 4. But every so often, somebody tries to do . At the individual level things are generally way more complex than these symptom-based diagnoses and the key is to ask *why* the kid isnt mixing well socially, gets into fights / lashes out, or cant sit still rather than reify it as a brain dysfunction. It stands to reason that f can be very intractable, and resolving that function is the difficult question where there is science to be done. I dont think this paragraph fits the note in the image. Maybe one bias from my statement is Im young, and many of my smart friends are also young. They find that even autistic people without de novo mutations have lower-than-average IQ. Insofar as autism has a coherent definition, it is a category that embraces a variety of behavioral and neural processing anomalies. Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know What led me to ask this is stories of people who were deaf from birth whod get cochlear implants as adults. Thats exactly what we observe here. Its because we selectively bred dogs to have these traits at a much faster rate than evolution could naturally develop them. So you end up with a system where every gene that increases hyperparameter A makes the individual smarter, except that the individual becomes mentally ill if the hyperparameter exceeds a certain threshold. How much do we know about how intelligence develops and what might impact it? Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. Isnt autism a bit more sensitive to increased parental age than many other mental disorders? In Iceland., https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.full. He is the most Civil Servicy person around. (Then also add to that the fact that people making a big deal out of Wow you can do this thing! can be super unpleasant). So the only question is whether the size of the effect is enough to fully explain the data or whether, even after adjusting out the degree to which autism is caused by mutations and environment, it still decreases IQ. * Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration I was a bit of an outlier in my family, and didnt really find a peer group I fitted in with until university. It was my first thought, too admittedly followed by the second thought wait, no, theyll have thought of that one ages ago. She is a university qualified computer systems engineer. ASD core diagnostic symptoms are not uniquely linked and are only very rarely expressed without nondiagnostic symptoms. Knowing how much of the genetic variance in intelligence (say IQ for an easy measure) is additive is probably good enough to figure out how off the purely linear assumption is. Pretending that people with autism diagnoses are typical of people with autism is useful when trying to treat the symptoms of autism; but ignoring less symptomatic people results in ineffective studies when trying to figure out causes and effects. This is consistent with the existence of people in the past who seem to be about as bright as humans get. Both moderate to high IQ. 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. Immune systems that greet pathogens with a really forceful response on a hair trigger. Given that many drugs both medical and recreational appear to affect similarly subtle parameters broadly through relatively simple molecules, theres no reason to assume they cant be much more specifically fine-tuned through genetics. Why would you doubt it if you dont have the data? I guess in a context-specific sense, normal is being defined as not-autistic? 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 Draft. Low IQ fathers are less likely to be available due to death/imprisonment/not being around anymore/maybe not even knowing who the father is. It doesnt really present much evidence for this other than that autistic people seem to have high perceptual intelligence. That said, I too doubt the extreme male brain hypothesis in a general sense, although it may be true in a more limited sense (where autism consists of more masculine features for certain parts of the brain, but not all of them). Moments of it? But the Gardner study also ceilings off at 90th percentile intelligence, so at this point Im not sure what to tell these people. One possible explanation is simply that autistic children born to poor parents/less intelligent parents/disadvantaged minorities are simply more likely to die in infancy/early childhood and thus never be diagnosed as being autistic to begin with. I dont think you can model the autism-IQ correlation using a simple additive genetic model. 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.) Preoccupation with whats normal and whether you are normal is a sign of mediocrity in my experience (though its not terminal). Commentary: The autistic community is having a reckoning with ABA 2. I remember seeing that article 10 years ago and Ive never followed up, so replication not guaranteed. It also becomes meaningless to say that no highly intelligent people are normal, since by definition, highly intelligent people will think in different ways than people with average intelligence. Most genuinely intelligent people are also fairly charismatic. But the basic eugenics of moving intelligence higher at the margin through differential fertility, or the soon-to-be possible embryo selection for intelligence, this is not an argument against that. This makes a very strong auditory learner. Posted on June 15, 2020 by Scott Alexander. We are both university qualified. The dangling paren is disquieting enough to have prompted me to make an account: most of the other statistics mentioned here). As for genetics, well, my IQ is ~135, and my wifes is right there with me (~125). I recall it because the lowest functioning children all had loser fathers. > (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. If you get much past that, all intelligible sound will cease and be replaced by a terrible noise that wasnt exhibited _anywhere_ prior in the range of the knob. Yeah, your reaction is what I was scrolling down here to say, but you beat me to it. I am a highly educated (PhD) male parent of a son with autism (aged 17 so in high school), who is in a Special Education class, so I fit the phenotype described here. control children (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. You dont need a tower-and-foundation model to explain how both higher than usual prevalence of intelligence-associated genes in autistic individuals and extremely intelligent non-autistic people. Energy/perseverance/drive and other harder to measure factors. Sure, most of them. Also, it doesnt really look like autistic people are worse at mental rotation. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent. This is not the whole story, and even cases of autism that are caused entirely or mostly by normal genetics are associated with unusually low IQ (80% confidence), 5. The existence of a well-defined subset of low IQ people whose relatives have higher-than-predicted IQs is a surprising finding that cuts through the measurement difficulties and suggests that this is a real phenomenon.