A genetic test for 'No autism'?

One supposed this question has oft been proposed,

Those autism genes being thin on the genome,

None showing up in more than one in twenty,

Many showing up in less than one percent.

One hypothesises that it may be equally common,

Those without autism are ninety nine percent likely,

likely to have a gene which only one percent,

of autists have. Perhaps?

Oh crap! Does anyone know anything about genetics?

Autism caused by 'The Weather'?

Firstly we must make our position clear on global warming. We do not deny that it may be anthropogenic but we do deny that anyone can prove that it is anthropogenic. We believe that past weather or current trend is no guarantee of future weather.

We believe that an Ice Age could come soon. Rather, we believe that the current interglacial may end soon. This has happened many times before, and has happened to the human race and it's ancestors several times. Before the advent of agriculture and civilisation, an ice age meant two things:

1) Reliable food supplies may no longer be reliable
2) Extreme weather and famine can cause populations to split into two or more groups which then find themselves separated for a considerable number of generations.

So it goes a little something like this:

The weather changes and the population gets split up to evolve separately. The change in weather has an effect on the food supply leading to the need for new adaptations and sometimes resorting to consumption of conspecifics. Given that humans are apex predators, then who is the predator in a meeting between two humans where one must eat the other or both will die?

Given four billion years of evolution, she will have sensed the change in the weather several generations in advance and requested a set of genetic changes to be introduced in some individuals. It is these individuals who are given the biological destiny of rising to the trophic level above themselves when disaster strikes and the consumption of conspecifics is the only option for the continuing survival of the human race.

This probably applies more to our Neanderthal ancestors than to us. It was harder up north when it were ice age!

Autism caused by 'No Cannibals'?

There is yet another hypothesis for the aetiological drivers behind autism spectrum disorders which, just like the others, blames cannibals and is ignored by the autism community, the scientific community and the blogger community alike.

This one is different, however, in that it does not require autistic people to actually be cannibals for a change. Rather, it requires that the lack of the need for humans to guard against intra-specific predation has led to a de-selection of the mental and physical tools required to keep this brain-intensive skill on the genetic 'wants list'.

It goes something like this; A long time ago, probably 107,000 years ago, give or take a tick or two, people were people and people, like spiders, eat people when hungry enough. It's not as if we were eating our own brothers and sisters. Even little dragons don't do that (well, 20% less much).

It was some folk who'd been away for rather a long time up north found their way down south and, having polished off all the bears and elephants, turned their attentions to the people who were already happily occupying the Levant. These people, the Neanderthals, were very well equipped for taking advantage of this new food source. Recognising the Levantine folk as being sentient hunters, rather than risk a head-on encounter, the Neanderthal would remain at higher altitudes undetected, approaching and watching only at night. Only after considerable observations and planning had been completed did they chance a series of night raids which eventually became known to our ancestors, and later us, as the sagas of The Watchers in the Ge'ez and Hebrew chronicles, now known as the Bible (Gen 6).

Aadi, 'we' managed to extricate ourselves from this situation, with the help of a little Neanderthal DNA which we'd acquired along the way. The development of modern empathy was crucial to this great escape. After the Neanderthal predators had been discovered and descriptions of them were circulating, they moved into a more hands-on management role and more or less established the styles of man-management we see used right up until, well, still today in fact. Bluntly, any attempt to communicate secretly with ones' co-captured kin was met with a swift and brutal extinction of the dissenting person or persons.

When we finally managed to escape, we did it with our eyes. To this day, we celebrate with football.

That period of empathic development was an anti-predator adaptation. Now that it is no longer needed, it is falling away. Our bodies are no longer convinced that we must have empathy in order to survive so nature, the mother, the father, whatever steers our beings into being, decides that empathy is too expensive to sustain, and invests in FTW instead, a condition caused by getting food tokens confused with real food without the presence of the threat of cannibalism.

How can we test this hypothesis and how would it explain:

'New Autism Research Reveals Brain Differences at 6 Months in Infants Who Develop Autism'

as well as the 'Cannibal Hypothesis' does?

Neoteny, why there's not any in a Neanderthal, and there's more of some in Autism.

Neoteny, one of the three directions of heterochrony, would seem at first appearance to be a blow to the 'Cannibals selected for non-cannibalism hypothesis' for autism.  It's neotenous nature led it to register www.originsofautism.com before anyone else, yet it fails like all the others in that appears to be describing 'a subset of the tools in the workshop' rather than 'the reason for the kind of bicycle being constructed', as an explanation for the causation of a particular kind of bicycle, widget or person.

However, in case you missed it, neoteny is taken as a sign that cannibalism will not occur, and so it is preserved while the more ogrish amongst us are forced from the face of the earth.

Another perhaps less chilling explanation for the increased prevalence of neoteny in autistic populations is that autistic people behave inappropriately i.e. they make social mistakes. A social mistakes' cost is measured in terms of the consequences meted out, whether officially or otherwise, by society. Those who look young, child-like or pretty are more likely to go on to be allowed to build a family despite their social faux-pas.

This is also why cannabis for autism is facing formidable opposition. It is highly likely that the more intelligent, more attractive females asperger's are the ones least likely to have need for medication, the ones most likely to oppose the use of any medication, the ones least likely to understand the point of view of those in need of medication, and the ones who have most influence over the general public at large.

Cannabis for Autism Angels Required. Apply on Facebook.

Hypertrophy Hypothesis of Autism put to the Test.

A hypothesis must be testable to qualify as a hypothesis. Then it must be tested, failing falsification many times in many different ways, before being accepted as a 'Theory'.

This is why your theory about vaccines gets laughed at, while your hypothesis about vaccines gets you hummed at.

The most common version of the Hypertrophy Hypothesis of Autism states that the epigenetic changes that are required to produce an autistic individual are acquired over one or more generations where the following conditions are satisfied:

1) The mother's food was very regular.
2) The mother's food was fully nutritious.
3) The mother never genuinely believed that starvation was an option for her family.

In order to test this part of the hypothesis, we would need to find two populations, as similar in ancestry as possible, where one population had suffered considerable periods of widespread starvation but the other had not.

Planet earth, with all it's separate nation states and laws, provides a huge laboratory rich with data. If only we can work out how to mine it...

Last year, a South Korean study found an estimate for the autism rate within their country by screening large numbers of children. The criteria for 'autism' were very loose so the research gave us a figure of approximately 2.5% of South Korean children having some form of autism.

If we sent the same team to North Korea, to perform the same testing on North Korean children, the Hypertrophy Hypothesis makes the following prediction:

Autism rates in the North will be significantly lower than autism rates in the South, even after adjusting for all other known risk factors.

Getting permission to do the research may be a bit of a problem. However, if the autism rate is likely to be lower than the South's, then the North might be just interested...



PS. Still hung up on the 'Neanderthal Hypothesis of Autism'? There's a test for that too. In the meantime, find me 100 full-blood ethnic south Africans with Autism and we can say *goodnight darling* to the Neanderthal story.

Rats, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution

What would happen if an artificial community of rats was manipulated to give a changing pattern of 'role distribution' over time such that it mimicked the human race's changing patterns?

For the sake of simplicity, let us say that one human generation = 100 rat generations.

Initially, at T-10,000 years (~500 human generations, about 50 years in rat timescales) we have 100% wild type rats.

As the generations pass, some rats will begin to take the role of 'farmers' and the rest will remain wild. The farmer rats will have an electronic tag fitted which will allow their environment to be controlled in respect of that particular rat.

All rats will be able to 'forage' for a slightly inadequate amount of food, but the bulk of their food will only appear when the 'farmer' rats have done enough 'work'.
Farmer rats will release food upon having delivered a certain amount of work. These rats will be able to eat only the food released by their own work, in addition to the small amount available for foraging. Wild type rats will still be able to forage, they will also have access to food released by all the 'farmers'!

The proportion of 'farmers' will increase from 0 to 90% until we get to T-200 years when we will introduce a third role, the 'worker rat'. The worker rat will not be able to work for food or forage for food. Worker rats will enjoy a life of leisure but will be dependent on  'farmer' rats for food. Wild rats will still be able to forage and take food from both other kinds of rat.

Throughout the experiment, rat populations will be allowed to follow the same rate of increase as human populations did over the relative timescales. Whenever populations get 5% bigger than they should be, food supplies are constricted for one generation and excess rats are removed at random, sacrificed, and examined at the molecular level.

That's the basic outline anyway. The purpose of the experiment is to look for neurological changes that might give us clues as to whether or not the changing role structure of the human race could be responsible for the development of psychiatric disorders such as autism, adhd, sociopathy and related.

Some Sense

Some may sense that the human race is under some population pressure, and that infectious disease is one option for population reduction.

If this was the case, with a small leap of imagination, the child could receive instructions, in utero, to develop a better immune system and a more analytical mind along with a disconnect from normal sociability (and a slightly larger head).

The mother could later be inclined to fight against disease control methods. Even going so far as to become unfathomably passionately vocal against immunisation or anything else that so much as resembles sensible infection control methodologies.

A poor lady's response to a population crisis may be to try to outrun the pack by having more offspring. A rich lady's options are somewhat less obvious. When the morality of the day forbids the generation of dozens of kids of one's own, then what can one legally do to reduce the size of the surrounding population by way of compensation?

It's not called a human race for nothing, and all forms of locomotion including cheating and sabotage are not only permissible but inevitable under Hobs law.

Hyper-nutrition as a driver for ASD

When you were an egg in your mummy's tummy when your grandmother was pregnant with your mother, your great-great grandmother, your great-grandmother, and your grandmother all sang a song to your mother, and that song was taught to your great-great grandmother by your great-great-great-great grandmother, you heard it, and it's encoding onto your 'junk dna' was reinforced. That song spanned six generations of women, sometimes it can span as many as ten generations.

Nothing new here, just a slightly more politically correct hypothesis for a possible 'cause' of autism than the one presented in the previous post.

Looking at this, this and now this, along with the baffling set of demographic correlates for ASD, one finds it hard to ignore the possibility that these correlates are all compatible with a streamlining of the diet, maybe over a small number of generations, giving rise to exploratory evolutionary changes in the human race.

The only thing that autistic people have in common is the triad of social impairments, which could be a fundamental requirement for exploratory evolution. As for the rest of the differences we find from one autistic individual to the next, there seems to be no end to the variation. As if mother nature is telling the human race to let it's hair down and find a new trend!

Cannibals for Autism?

Yes that's right. Autism is cannibals. Don't worry, like all animals that consume conspecifics, autistic people will not attempt to eat conspecifics if fed (and in some cases restrained).

This explains why there are more combinations of genetic expression found in autism than any other genetic disorder. It is because it relates to something so fundamental as 'Which way does which food travel?', this is applicable to any higher animal and certainly any mammal.

Whenever a population of animals experiences cannibalism, that population adapts to attempt to recognise predation in it's midst. Any obvious predators are removed but still nature keeps churning out new cannibals! It's not the baby's fault, it's the fault of the human race for being so good at producing food yet paradoxically easy to catch and eat, superficially speaking.

They say that when you've met one person with autism you've met one person with autism. Nature and evolution will try absolutely anything to get at the best meat (which she has been making for herself all this time).

Cannabis is the cure for Cannibals. That's the hypotheses, will it stand the test of time? Only the elimination of all other possible aetiologies for autism would leave the obvious, however unthinkable, as the strongest contender.

Those autistic mice by the way, what the researchers don't tell us is that half these autistic mice are eating the other mice when they don't feed them and put them in a cage together.