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rdos
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03 Mar 2012, 4:13 am

DemocraticSocialistHun wrote:
But why would people who live in small groups with low population density (one must go far to find another small group) need good immune systems? Pathogens wipe out whole communities in Africa often unless high-tech medicine intervenes.


Good immune systems seems to be diverse immune systems. Even if Neanderthal didn't need an effective immune system against infectious disease because of sparse groups, they still had variants that modern humans didn't have.

DemocraticSocialistHun wrote:
The only possible reason I can think of is that the neurodivergent have too low rates of reproduction and invest too much in offspring while the neurotypicals consider life to be rather cheap. That would explain most philosophical and behavioral differences well too.


Yes, I think that is true.



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12 Mar 2012, 12:00 am

rdos wrote:
aghogday wrote:
Unfortunately, even with random sampling in Africa, the Aspie quiz cannot escape western cultural bias, just like IQ tests. One would almost have to design a neurodiversity test specific to each culture in Africa, that could be understood with the differences in nuance of language and meaning specific to each culture. And the person that designed the test would likely need to be a member of the culture to effectively do this.


I suggested something like this earlier, but not based on culture but based on ancestry. It seems likely that Asians and Africans might need their own neurodiversity tests, with Africans needing a quite different variant. After all, we also have evidence from Africa of a 5% archaic admixture. This should be detectable in Africa with a suitable neurodiversity test, that might be very unlike the European / Neanderthal version. We need another neurodiversity test in Asia because of admixture with Denisovan, and possibly other groups as well. The Asian version would be quite similar to the European version as Neanderthal and Denisovan was not that different.

Then, if we combine these 3 different neurodiversity-tests into a single version, we might be able to detect the 3 principal components of archaic admixture (Neanderthal, Denisovan, African) in people world-wide, and give meaningful ancestral scores to people that are not "skin deep", but real. Of course, most people would get low ancestral scores and high neurotypical scores. We might even be able to detect more components that are currently unknown.

Actually, neurodiversity in Africa being quite different from neurodiversity in Eurasia would explain several findings. It can explain why African Americans have no interest in a neurodiversity test based on Eurasian neurodiversity, as they cannot identify with that. If we presume that the 5% admixture in Africa also is related to introgression from a quite different species, we also would anticipate to find a form of autism in Africa. This is because autism is related to incompatbilities in communication and social behaviors, which persist after an introgression event. However, this form of autism would not be correlated with an Eurasian based neurodiversity test to any great degree other than at a superficial level.

I'm not against the idea of neurodiversity in some form existing in Africa. I'm against the idea that neurodiversity in the sense I know it (from a Western culture) exists in Africa.


I am a little confused. Let's see if I get this right. I believe that you are referring to a West African introgression. Would this extend into Sub-Sahara Africa too?

It seems to me that there are three major climates -- savannah/desert, wet temperate, and tropical. Sub-Sahara Africa and the nearby Middle East are savannah/desert and (I would think) don't accept neurodiversity of any form [1]. Much of the rest of the planet is temperate and wet. Much of the planet has Neanderthal introgression. Perhaps tropical Africa has its own introgression?

[1] Could the change in Islamic attitudes coincided with a change to a drier climate or an influx of desert/savannah people? Or is the problem that attitudes haven't improved over time to the extent they have elsewhere? It wasn't long ago that something like 80% of the population of civilizations where held in chattel slavery.


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Last edited by DemocraticSocialistHun on 12 Mar 2012, 7:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

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12 Mar 2012, 12:23 am

We have become so mixed that trying to diversify may be too difficult for many so i suggest trying to respect all no matter what they are, or odd or strange relative to your perception or how opposite from your opinion. That is what is mostly lacking in te world that most desire is respect for just being themselves, what heritage or race or whatever doesnt matter, respect for all especially those with differences no matter what has worked for me since i know that few would understand me so i respect them hoping for the respect to me despite my odd which aspergers maybe part.


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12 Mar 2012, 3:18 am

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/how_we_evolve/P1/

@RDOS: Your "neanderthal friend" posted the article linked above on another website; it is reflective of some of the discussions of the impact culture has on evolution. It mentions a "civilization gene", which is somewhat analagous/controversial to what you have suggested is a type of neurodiversity that developed in Eurasia.

Quote:
It makes sense that some alleles present in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world wouldn’t appear in Sub-Saharan Africa, and vice versa; population flow has not yet had time to spread all alleles to all parts of the world. However, it’s hard for many of us not to hear in Lahn’s musings on brain genes the ugly implication that Africans are inferior. But such was not Lahn’s intention, nor was that his finding. It was not even what he was investigating.

“Some interpret it as meaning, this is the civilization gene, which is clearly not what we’re trying to say. Maybe we should have said it with more qualifications, to avoid the misconception,” he says. The belief that minor mutations to two genes could bring about a profound and essential difference to an abstract quality as polymorphous as intelligence Lahn sees as springing from America’s confusion about race, its desire to overcome a shameful past, and a fear that old racist beliefs might be given empirical support. Nevertheless, Lahn and his group did ultimately investigate whether possession of the new alleles correlated with intelligence. It did not.

Indeed, possession of Lahn’s variants might have nothing to do with intelligence. “It could impact emotionality, the ability to be patient, for example,” he says. “Our understanding of brain evolution at the phenotype level is so rudimentary right now. We’re very far from actually breaking down the difference between human and other species, let alone among humans.”



Quote:
“Intelligence builds on top of intelligence,” says Lahn. “[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is a positive feedback loop, I would think.” Increasing intelligence increases the complexity of culture, which pressures intelligence levels to rise, which creates a more complex culture, and so on. Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind.

Lahn says there could be “some deep-down information theory perspective” that underlies both the rapid increase in human intelligence and an event like the Cambrian explosion, the unequaled diversification of life forms that occurred about 500 million years ago. In an eyeblink, almost every modern body plan came into existence. “It may take a long time to evolve certain components of the body plan, but once you have them, minor tinkering that requires not many changes and very little evolutionary time could give you great diversity in body plans and species,” Lahn says. “The brain may be similar, because it takes a long time to get to a certain level of intelligence, but once you get there, it makes possible a cultural explosion.”

Both events inched toward a threshold that, once crossed, was soon left far behind. The 20th century, in which it took us a mere 60 years to elaborate the horse-drawn carriage into a vehicle that carried us to the Moon, and the howitzer into a 50-megaton nuclear weapon, was another threshold. The forces that we created are on a different scale than those of nature, which works slowly. It seems possible that as our technology grows more subtle, genetic manipulation, gene manufacturing, and even cloning could finally carry us clear of natural selection, but such a commanding position can be maintained only with the survival of a technological society, and that is hardly a foregone conclusion.

The Bleakness of that vision exerts a strong hold on Paul Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford, who finds in the 20th century a minefield of near misses with extinction. We were saved as often by cunning as by dumb luck: intended to save sleeping families from exploding refrigerators cooled by ammonia, chlorofluorocarbons nearly fried the entire planet. As often as not, some solution creates a new problem.

“The fate of our civilization, and maybe our species,” says Ehrlich, “may be determined by the next five generations. So I don’t really give a sh*t what’s happening to our genetic evolution.” The global climate is changing too violently for DNA to respond by fiddling around with heat regulation and hair thickness; forests everywhere are being clear-cut too quickly for their inhabitants to adjust, and so food chains are coming undone; the collapse of global fisheries has been identified as an imminent calamity; and a nuclear disaster would constitute a catastrophe many orders of magnitude larger than what nature could readily absorb. If any of these nightmare scenarios comes to pass, Ehrlich fears, evolution will be unable to help us. It may be operating faster than we thought, but it’s not that fast. Problems like smog and acid rain seem almost quaint, and even to be longed for.

Species are transient. There is no question that the day will come when humans are no longer on Earth. But the transience to which we are subject has two faces. The first is extinction. Unlike our forebears, we are aware of how tenuous is our perch atop the food chain. It remains to be seen whether that knowledge has been acquired too late to be of use.

The second face of Homo sapiens’ eventual exit from history is the more hopeful possibility that we may yet evolve into our own successors. Unlike our forebears, we are aware of evolution, which changes our relationship to it, if only by a little, for we are still natural creatures. We continue to evolve, in the face of hunger, disease and a changing ecosystem; but our virtual habitat of culture could enable us to become both subjects of evolution and conscious co-directors of it. “It’s occurring,” says Ehrlich. “There’s no question about it. What’s frightening is the questions we’ll have to ask.”

Science must evolve new tools to raise us to such a commanding vantage, as well as to avert a self-inflicted extinction. Technology might some day enable us to control aspects of evolution, or it may prove to be the ultimate selection regime, culling all of us. Perhaps we already find ourselves wishing we’d lacked the intelligence to monkey with howitzers. Either way, the culture that we’ve created is, strangely, evolution’s most powerful tool and its potential nemesis, the womb of human nature and perhaps its grave. By our own hand: this is how we evolve.


When I saw the words emotionality and patience, as a potential adaptation to culture, it made me think of the "sitters" and the "rovers". Culture, while dominated by extroverted visuals, has also become systemized, by those that one might neither see as "rover or extrovert".

I would argue against the idea that neurodiversity peaked decades ago, and is now being selected against.

Culture seems to reflect this, at least in the US, through the cultural microcosm of the evolution of the Sit-Com. The spot light is normalizing odd as a standard in society.

"Cheers" and "Friends" have evolved into "The Office". Society is changing in the direction of the Office instead of the Bar. "Facebook and Twitter" is also an unwitting extension of it for many.

The collective voice of the Sitter is voiced on the internet; The fact that Ron Paul polls so well across so many corners of the internet appears to be evidence of this.

The broader phenotype of the Sitter, is gaining power through a collective voice on the internet, that spreads well beyond any site associated with autism. The influence is indirect in forces like Paul. This likely would not have been possible without the internet, and the systemizers that were behind not only the internet, but Paul as well.

He can't win, but he has diffused support for canidates in the Republican Party, that only an independent would have been able to do in the past.

The recent "anonymous" phenomenon is a fringe aspect, but it is reflective of a much larger anonymous effort that has been growing on the internet, with a real power of influence.

Perhaps a spark of this may have been somewhere in the life force of a Neanderthal, but the fire is in culture, and that culture is vastly different today than could have been imagined two decades ago.

The Aspie Quiz is part of that phenomenon, that likely would have had no voice without the internet. And one, that in part, deserves credit for the number of individuals who have diagnosed themselves as Aspie, and become part of online communities for Autism, regardless if that was the attempt of the Quiz.

But wait, it's not designed by a psychologist, instead a computer programmer, who also has an interest in some distant ancestors. That's the power of the internet, it gives a voice to humans that would likely, otherwise, never have been heard.

And, gives those anonymous individuals the potential of actually having a measurable influence on the world, without anyone's permission.

The rise of the sitter was at hand with the almost election of Al Gore in 2000. If the internet had been available, as it is now, at this time, the world would be different, no doubt, different than it is today.

Eight years passed, but now with the internet as it exists today, there is no turning back.

Ideas are more visible than presentation of one's physicality, on the internet. Obama's election was in part, a product of those internet voices, as well.



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12 Mar 2012, 5:23 am

The first image that pops up in my mind if I hear the word Neanderthal is a drawing of a thick, bearded and rugged white guy with very pronounced features. I am aware of the fact that there must have been female Neanderthals as well but my brain oesn't make that connection somehow.



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12 Mar 2012, 6:04 pm

pokerface wrote:
The first image that pops up in my mind if I hear the word Neanderthal is a drawing of a thick, bearded and rugged white guy with very pronounced features. I am aware of the fact that there must have been female Neanderthals as well but my brain oesn't make that connection somehow.


That's interesting. Historically, most depictions of Neanderthals are males in all forms of media, so in general, it's probably not part of the human psyche.

Here are two more recent pictures of male and female Neanderthals, that don't match historical depictions of Neanderthals. Interestingly, they are no longer depicted as being unusually hairy.

More interesting, is that the male is depicted as a rather happy fellow. He might be holding a prehistoric beer, but if so, the picture doesn't show it.

I think the female depiction is smiling too, she might be happier than the male for all I know, but it doesn't come across in the eyes. All of this, not relative at all. to the archaelogical record, other than what was in the mind of the artist.

I can't help but to think that artist renditions, are influenced now, by the fact that they are known to have bred with modern humans. Renditions have moved away from Ape like qualities, to depictions that aren't too far out of the norm of what modern humans look like.

The male is depicted as having a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. Maybe the artists are forgetting that mirrors didn't likely exist back in those days. :)


Image

Image

Not all modern renditions depict them in this way. At least one theory, that supports a predation theory of Neanderthals, presents a completely different image.

Image



aghogday
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12 Mar 2012, 6:37 pm

pokerface wrote:
The first image that pops up in my mind if I hear the word Neanderthal is a drawing of a thick, bearded and rugged white guy with very pronounced features. I am aware of the fact that there must have been female Neanderthals as well but my brain oesn't make that connection somehow.


I have to be fair and balanced. :) RDOS Neanderthal theory depicts an innocent looking neanderthal female child, that is opposite from the the image of the "not so kind" apelike fellow in the Neanderthal predation theory, in the last post.

It is a depiction that is so close to a modern human female child, that some have commented it takes them into the "uncanny valley effect".

Image

And finally somewhere in the middle; it's hard to determine who this intelligent looking fellow is. Probably as fair a representation as the others, but not labeled as neanderthal.

Image



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22 Mar 2012, 9:36 am

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LOL! Phillipe J Rushton??? No wonder he's so keen to prove a northern hemispheric advantage to intelligence!

Image

Image
Lookin' good Phil! 8)



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25 Mar 2012, 5:15 pm

It's interesting, since neanderthals have been understood to mix with humans, how much the depictions have moved away from ape and toward human.

I know I saw this guy below on wrestling some years ago, but I just can't place the name with the face :)

This attempt at a Neanderthal resconstruction reminds me of the Eurocentric view of Jesus, as a blue eyed fair skinned guy, out of the middle east. Except, this looks like a "macho Jesus" approach. :D

The neatly trimmed mustache, clean shaven neck exposing the jugular vein, is ridiculous. An obvious attempt to bring the depiction within the norms of not only modern day humans, but modern cultural norms as well, that require a razor.

Image



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01 Apr 2012, 8:53 am

aghogday wrote:
It's interesting, since neanderthals have been understood to mix with humans, how much the depictions have moved away from ape and toward human.

I know I saw this guy below on wrestling some years ago, but I just can't place the name with the face :)

This attempt at a Neanderthal resconstruction reminds me of the Eurocentric view of Jesus, as a blue eyed fair skinned guy, out of the middle east. Except, this looks like a "macho Jesus" approach. :D

The neatly trimmed mustache, clean shaven neck exposing the jugular vein, is ridiculous. An obvious attempt to bring the depiction within the norms of not only modern day humans, but modern cultural norms as well, that require a razor.

Image


Yeah, despite that crazy broad nose structure they've still gone for a Norwegian Death Metal band member look, lol.



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24 Oct 2012, 9:36 pm

Um, rdos, this may sound anecdotal but the ethnic distribution among Aspies / auties I've personally met doesn't support your hypothesis. In my (diverse) area, the autistic population has pretty much the same ethnic distribution as the NT population.

Do you seriously think that Africans don't get as much AS as Europeans? I've run into Aspies whose parents are immigrants from West Africa, and it's not like autism is super rare in their culture. The main thing is a lack of awareness, because many countries don't have a lot of psychiatrists to recognize the less-severe autisms. Could it be a sampling error on your part? Maybe there is a type of African Neanderthal out there, who knows.



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25 Oct 2012, 1:07 am

I can't even get what the OP was getting at. I couldn't make a theory out of it.

But, without going on a ridiculous diatribe, there is no proof present that there is ANY neanderthal DNA present in humans. If you read up on the DNA, what you have is a set of markers (1-4% of the 0.5% different) which have a presence only in Europeans and Neanderthals. That's all that's been proven. And, if you didn't know, that sort of thing can come from many ways, such as interbreeding, natural selection (since we were occupying the identical geographic area) or having a common ancestor. The media just jumped on the first theory since it was so dramatic.

Remember,

We both have red hair. Oh, wait, those were different mutations.
We both have fair skin. Oh, wait, those were different mutations.

Oh wait, we have ZERO mtDNA in common with them and ZERO Y-DNA in common with them. Not a person on the planet has a single common one with them. Not one.

And, that doesn't get into the real problems, like they may have not been able to even talk. There is a good chance we had different numbers of chromosomes, making hybrid children infertile, and the largest one, which is that we lived in tribes back then and killed those who crossed our boundaries. If you don't know or understand that, pull out some books on tribal behavior and evolutionary psychology. I'm telling you what's academic common knowledge. And, not only did we do that, and current tribes, as well, but chimps do it, on top of it. Fact. Therefore, that meant that the hybrid children (which have roughly been proven to exist) were never raised inside human tribes, and either died with their immediate family at some point later on, or within the Neanderthal tribes. In both cases, their genes wouldn't have been passed on to us.

In my personal opinion, they went extinct was primarily due to a change of climate and their hunting method. Neanderthals were sort of strong and stocky, well made for "ambush" style hunting, which is what works very well in heavy wooded, semi-cool forests. But, the climate and geography changed, making the forests dwindle and the food to stop coming in. And, after a while they had not enough to really feed themselves. At that point, their bodies probably shut down, like human women stop ovulating, and they began having less and less Neanderthal children. Generation after generation this occurred until they were gone. Of course, we thrived in this, since we were primarily strategic spear hunters, having come from East Africa, where much of it was open plains. Our hunting strategy (getting them from a long distance) worked well in the changed climate, where there were less forests, but more open areas. But, I digress.

Asperger's and Autism are, contrary to what many believe, human mutations that are actually advanced traits. And, the seem to have happened within the last 12,000 years or so, well after the Neanderthals went extinct. As I pointed out in another thread, I am fairly confident it had a dramatic effect on our 'great leap forward." At the time we both co-existed, things were quite basic, hunting and gathering, and that was all it was for both of us.

As another example... http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/ ... erbreeding

Mind you, in modern context, if we found a lone sole hiding out in the wilderness in Siberia, I'd consider him a brother to us humans. They're like distant cousins to us. And, they've gotten a bad rap. I'm in awe of the fact that they buried their dead and am sure they were a very loving sort (at least among themselves). But, they're not us.



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12 Aug 2013, 4:03 am

DemocraticSocialistHun wrote:
rdos wrote:
DemocraticSocialistHun wrote:
A big concern of mine is that it is very difficult to find much of anything that proposes that "autistic" traits can be functional.


The most evident example is "Aspie Talent". OTOH, the traits that are most useful for demonstrating that autistics possess unique, evolved, traits that neurotypicals don't have is "Aspie hunting". Possibly also stims, but those have been degraded to "tics" by psychiatry. They haven't discovered the Aspie hunting traits yet.


Most of those people that are writing anything positive are few and far between. Geneticists and biologists saying that the "medical" "Defective Mutant Hypothesis" isn't plausible and simply has to be wrong -- there are too many autistics for one thing (let alone the entire six neurodiversity groups in "Aspie"-Quiz) -- would be most helpful in getting things on the right track. Otherwise you and the handful of other exceptions such as:

Andrew Lehman -- Neoteny Theory http://www.neoteny.org (and many others)
Alan Griswold -- Autistic Symphony http://autisticsymphony.com
Morton Ann Gernsbacher -- How to Spot Bias in Research, Association for Psychological Science http://www.psychologicalscience.org/obs ... fm?id=2076
Michelle Dawson (autism research papers, often with others such as Gernsbacher) http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/
Olga Bogdashina -- Ukraine, U.K activist (President of the Autism Society, Ukraine)
Jared Edward Reser -- Solitary Forager Theory http://www.jaredreser.com/cognitivepars ... seven.html
Tyler Cowen -- Create Your Own Economy http://marginalrevolution.com/
Michael Simonson and others at the "Hunter School" in New Hampshire http://hunterschool.org, http://energeticallysensitivechild.com
Penny Spikins -- Mental problems gave early humans an edge, New Scientist 2837 02 November 2011 by Kate Ravilious
Dinah Murray, Mike Lesser and Wendy Lawson -- Montropism Hypothesis

are just howling in the wind of a category five hurricane.


The only correct and helpful author on autism is drew macpherson, he is the only one who'll make a difference for the autistic community. But he's ignored by the autistic community even by rdos, Henry markram, and you.

link: http://youmaybeinsane.webstarts.com/ind ... 0228130918

This book is the only valuable explanation, and people who think the human race is becoming less tolerant for variety is just so stupid. It's really not the case.
We never lived in a society which is so open for neurodiversity.



rdos
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12 Aug 2013, 4:47 am

paxfilosoof wrote:
The only correct and helpful author on autism is drew macpherson, he is the only one who'll make a difference for the autistic community. But he's ignored by the autistic community even by rdos, Henry markram, and you.

link: http://youmaybeinsane.webstarts.com/ind ... 0228130918

This book is the only valuable explanation, and people who think the human race is becoming less tolerant for variety is just so stupid. It's really not the case.
We never lived in a society which is so open for neurodiversity.


He doesn't offer any insights into neurodiversity that I can see. For example, in the beginning of the book he claims that aspergians primarily communicate verbally. Such incorrect conclusions means we have to assume that he knows little to nothing about neurodiversity. Not only is Dyslexia and Selective Mutism linked to neurodiversity, but so are differences in communication. By far the best way to know the feelings of neurodiverse people is by observation of body-cues (not facial expressions). And I suppose you should know that difficulty expressing feelings verbally is a big problem for many neurodiverse people. So unless you claim that neurodiverse people lack feelings and ways of expressing them, you and macpherson will have to rethink this.



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12 Aug 2013, 4:55 am

rdos wrote:
paxfilosoof wrote:
The only correct and helpful author on autism is drew macpherson, he is the only one who'll make a difference for the autistic community. But he's ignored by the autistic community even by rdos, Henry markram, and you.

link: http://youmaybeinsane.webstarts.com/ind ... 0228130918

This book is the only valuable explanation, and people who think the human race is becoming less tolerant for variety is just so stupid. It's really not the case.
We never lived in a society which is so open for neurodiversity.


He doesn't offer any insights into neurodiversity that I can see. For example, in the beginning of the book he claims that aspergians primarily communicate verbally. Such incorrect conclusions means we have to assume that he knows little to nothing about neurodiversity. Not only is Dyslexia and Selective Mutism linked to neurodiversity, but so are differences in communication. By far the best way to know the feelings of neurodiverse people is by observation of body-cues (not facial expressions). And I suppose you should know that difficulty expressing feelings verbally is a big problem for many neurodiverse people. So unless you claim that neurodiverse people lack feelings and ways of expressing them, you and macpherson will have to rethink this.


He claims that the brains are wired different which make it difficult to interpret nonverbal, eye-contact, and misses unspoken social norms at the same time which is true.
He also claim that aspergians communicate verbal which is the case. He also explain what you call neurodiversity nonverbal (something you recognize in 10 seconds when you meeting someone new, the feeling of "insane" and "sane")

So let me sum up:

1. He indeed claims aspergian people communicate primarily verbally. And this is the case.
He claims that people with dyslexia (sometimes aspergian sometimes neurotypical) are sometimes people with aspergian traits (majority aspergian traits) and neurotypical language trait (mixed genes). So he explains that you could have neurotypical traits but be aspergian if the majority of traits are aspergian (look at table end of his book)

table:
Image

2. He doesn't talk alone about facial experessions also about body-cues or what he call nonverbal.

Here he explains in a couple of pages what an aspergian is without going into the neurology and genetics:
http://web.archive.org/web/200810152110 ... ights.org/



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12 Aug 2013, 6:08 am

There is a correlation between IQ and salary, higher the IQ, higher the salary. Just the way it should be.



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