MoonCanvas wrote:
Autistic's tend to have larger brains. It's time people wake up to reality.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShD72mfYqUM[/youtube]
Neurotypicals simply have smaller brains. Meaning... And for the record, not only is my skull larger than my father's but my father is also dumb enough to say "Obama is a Muslim sympathizing ******" meaning my intelligence also correlates positively with my larger skull. The correlation is accurate and I think from a Darwinian point of view, autistic's will take over the population in a few more centuries. What need is there to love one's family when you have logic and reasoning? The human race was going to evolve into a species of people who discard their instincts for logic and this is what we're seeing. All speculation but really, normal people can't sense as well, can't think as well, and seem to kill eachother(Iraq War, World War's).
1)Who did the skull measuring. It needs to be an objective 3rd party who is able to use the measuring tape (if done at home) in exactly the same place on both skulls and who also takes into account your greater amount of hair. A young man has much thicker hair than a middle aged man and that must be taken into account. It could easily be that your skulls are the exact same size but your thicker hair confounded the measurement unless it was done with a device that puts a rod through the hair and directly onto the skull.
2)Even if your skull is larger, this does not mean that your brain is larger than your father's. There can be variations in thickness of skull and variations in how close the brain is to the skull, although since those things are genetic it is likely to be the same or at least very similar to your father since you are his direct descendent unless adopted.
3)You do realize, don't you, that you are not going to be evolutionarily different from your father.
4)An angry political remark that your father made and that you don't agree with does not mean you are smarter than him.
5)Q: "What need is there to love one's family when you have logic and reasoning?"
A: Logic and reasoning should have led you to the anwer. Love binds people together emotionally and causes emotional investment in the well being of other people, creating incentive for not destroying them and making social support networks possible. In practice it's a lot more complicated than that and the love sometimes backfires horribly with horrible results, but that is the reason it evolved.
6)Discarding instincts for logic is not a good idea for either individual or species survival. Instinct and logic are in balance and are likely to stay in balance unless we start tinkering with our DNA to somehow actively alter that. Luckily there is a large body of scientific knowledge about the necessities of various emotions and instincts. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that there is some sort of divide whereby NTs got all the instinct/emotion and AS people got all the logic/reason. There is no such divide.
7)There is evidence that many AS people have certain senses heightened as opposed to NT people. (Intense World Theory, which does look credible). This will be helpful in some situations, hurtful in others. As another poster noted, these sensory sensitivities would be helpful in a hunter/gatherer enviroment, harmful in an urban enviroment. So maybe the sensory filter is an adaptation to increased crowding and AS people don't have that filter. Or maybe it's something else. The genetic signatures are still being worked out. Once they are worked out, it will be possible to DNA test various populations and see the spread of various alleles and see how they correlate with other features. Do hunter/gatherer populations have these hypersensitivities but without autism? Who is carrying the genetic markers (whatever they will turn out to be) but doesn't have autism? And why? Is there an enviromental component?
In a terribly ham handed way you did sort of raise those questions in the other thread you started about doubting there is such a thing. I think it will ultimately turn out to be much more complicated than it currently seems. Some things under the autism spectrum umbrella may turn out to be unrelated but superficially similar acting. There might be a complex interaction between many genes and many enviromental factors. Further understanding of epigenetics could help sort that out.
But I doubt it is as simple as being farther forward (Next Step in Evolution theory) or farther back (Neanderthal theory) on a linear human evolution timeline. Things never turn out to be that simple.
02 Jul 2013, 2:13 am
