The Cannibal Hypothesis of the Euphemism Treadmill

The euphemism treadmill is not an affliction in and of itself, rather it is a symptom of a deeper emotional trauma suffered by the human race as a whole.

Language is constantly mutating, a major driving factor for this change being the 'arms race' whereby an attempt at phonic lure is foiled by phonic (and in the human case, semantic) drift.

This is found across the animal kingdom, humans being no exception.
Neanderthals being the last extant exception.
Returning to the Upper Palaeolithic, we find the situation where the Neanderthal, as top predator, has foregone it's linguistic defensive drift in language in exchange for a more powerful language of accounting and sustainable domination of the food chain.
The arms race takes a new turn. The hominids who were beneath the Neanderthal in the food chain, began to acquire the Neanderthal language in addition to their own, but could not use it to it's full capabilities. That is, not until the Neanderthals tried to upgrade their stock of 'edible' hominids to those which were capable of managing their own farming by cross breeding themselves with some of the fairer edible hominids (Suggest you read Enoch for more detail on this part of the story).

This breeding program eventually went awry, producing hybrid offspring who saw the opportunity to lead a mutiny, eventually becoming the 70,000 year effort to exterminate any and all sign of Neanderthal dna from the face of the planet. They could never purge that which was now integrated into the dna of Homo Sapiens, we still average 2.5% Neanderthal dna apiece.
While modern humans face no immediate threat from predation by other hominids, the euphemism treadmill is still in place, and disincarnate forms of conspecific predation are the norm. Phonic lure is still widely used in human conspecific predation, with the linguistic and semantic drift only providing protection in certain sets of circumstances.
Every animal inherits an answer, or set of answers, to the question 'what animal am I', determining the language development envelope for the animal.
The 'Neanderthal' hypothesis of autism suggests than people with autism may have inherited the 

'neanderthal' set (or subset) of answers to the question 'what animal am I'?
Hence the difficulty in acquiring natural Homo Sapiens' language, though through echolalia, we still see the natural tendency towards phonic lure coming through.
Autistic people would have died out a long time ago, if not for the pathological matchmaking efforts of neurotypicals. You can't keep a good gene down.
We conclude that the euphemism treadmill may be distressing to some people with autism, and this may be ameliorated by talking about palaeolithic trauma or perhaps hypno-regression therapy, mdma assisted therapy, yoga or similar.

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.