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A human-accelerated neuron type potentially underlying autism in humans

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185 points ivewonyoung | 7 comments | 28 Sep 25 23:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.933s | source | bottom
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agentcoops ◴[29 Sep 25 01:03 UTC] No.45409472[source]▶
There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.
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nkozyra ◴[29 Sep 25 03:21 UTC] No.45410064[source]▶
> in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic

I find this part to be a really strong highlight of our change in perception of autism and what it means to be "autistic" or "on the spectrum."

Perhaps due to the broadening of the spectrum or just an odd association with success and spectrum attributes, we now strongly associate intelligence with spectrum. Historically - perhaps due to a narrower definition of autism - the inverse was true. It's understood now to not have much strong correlation with IQ at all, but apply fairly distributed in a way similar to general population, certainly not skewed one way or the other in a strong way.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9058071/

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1. hyghjiyhu ◴[29 Sep 25 11:51 UTC] No.45412555[source]▶
I still think it's odd how aspergers disappeared as a label. Made more sense than a spectrum with both really smart people and really stupid ones.
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2. dns_snek ◴[29 Sep 25 12:32 UTC] No.45412907[source]▶
Why? We don't have 2 different terms for "blindness" (or any other condition for that matter), one for people who are intelligent and another for those who aren't.

Hans Asperger was a Nazi collaborator who drew an imaginary line between "less autistic" children, whom he believed could still be valuable to society, and "more autistic" children who were considered to be a threat to their racial purity - so he murdered them. That's the only reason this distinction came to be.

Autism "spectrum" isn't about severity at all - it's a spectrum because every person has a unique presentation and combination of challenges, e.g. sensory processing, communication, relationships, emotional processing, and cognitive rigidity. "Asperger syndrome" was just one specific combination of those that drew a line between people who are worthy of life and those who aren't.

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3. estimator7292 ◴[29 Sep 25 18:12 UTC] No.45416932[source]▶
This is a direct result of a push from within the autistic community to stop using eugenicist labels and notions of "more" or "less" autistic. The community is really sensitive to eugenics because of all of the people trying to do eugenics against them and treating them as subhuman.

Autism isn't a scalar. One is not more or less autistic than another. It's a multidimensional vector space where each individual has unique needs and disabilities throughout that space.

We also don't really talk about the IQ angle because, again, eugenics and elitism. It is a fact that some or many autistic people are incredibly intelligent, but it is exclusively allistic people who get hung up on this point. For autistic people, it's just the way things are and we have to make do, just like with everything else in life.

Turns out when a lot of people want to murder, sterilize, experiment on, or genetically engineer you, you get pretty sensitive about other people using actual, factual, literal Nazi eugenicist ideas to describe you.

That's why everyone should be using the terms that autistic people choose for themselves. So that you're not continuing to promote, again, actual Nazi war crimes as a way to distinguish "good" autism from "bad". That's why we've purged Asperger's as a diagnostic label.

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4. ◴[29 Sep 25 20:02 UTC] No.45418101[source]▶
5. hyghjiyhu ◴[29 Sep 25 23:47 UTC] No.45420265[source]▶
This happened like 5-10 years ago didn't it? What changed?
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6. seec ◴[30 Sep 25 15:59 UTC] No.45427177[source]▶
It's not very odd. It's all part of the drift of science, where now things are loosely defined and what passes for science is often political propaganda.

The removal of Aspergers label has a lot more do to with politics (not wanting to be associate with nazi) than anything else.

As far I'm concerned, the only hope is from genetics studies, which greatly accelerated thanks to computing. At some point with enough studies, we will know what's what. In the meantime, it is safe to discard most of the bullshit coming from psychological studies...

7. ddmf ◴[13 Oct 25 10:15 UTC] No.45566721{3}[source]▶
I was diagnosed with aspergers just as this happened - basically new information came out showing he'd sent the higher support need autistic kids off for experimentation so they'd leave him alone with his lower support needs autistic kids.