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.

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!