Thursday 16 January 2003

Pic of the day: Think twice. There may be a good biological reason why nerds are not the first choice in human pair bonding. (Screenshot from The Sims, in which introverted personalities rarely get involved in romance unless pushed by a higher power. In this case me.)

Do nerds beget autists?

Continued from last week. The pieces of the puzzle are clicking into place. (And if you read Nova Notes you will realize how on topic that is. The writer of this awesome online journal – better than my own certainly – has an autist son who is a master of jigsaw puzzles. But he is just a little piece of this puzzle himself.)

Strangely enough, a disproportionate number of my online friends live in California. And a few of them even study at UC Davis. A report from this university confirmed that there is an "epidemic" of autism in that state. California has a different (and, most agree, better) system for registering autism in official statistics, and offering appropriate health care. For this reason, some had believed that people moved to California with their autist children. Not so: This study showed that 90% of the autists were born in the state. And the number had nearly tripled in a decade.

At about the same time, a Danish study of 500 000 children showed that there were no connection between autism and any type of vaccine. Autism is growing there too, but seemingly at a slower pace than California.

All of these had theoretical interest to me, but also a little more. For a while, I had suspected that my uncle was an autist.

***

When I was a child, I had an uncle in the attic. This was not an imaginary friend, but a real person who I imagined wasn't there. He did not take part in any of the family activities. He did not come down into the living room or even any of the other rooms upstairs. He lived for much of my childhood in one single bedroom up there, and we did not see him. I think I saw him two times before he left for an institution. How old was I then? 10? Somewhere around that, I think. It may have been less. But for much of my formative years, he was there, and still I always thought of our family as having 8 members, not 9, and I continued remembering it that way until I was in my thirties.

The official version was that my uncle was an idiot. He did not talk, or communicate in any other way. He could learn extremely simple things, such as folding his hands before the meal, but that was it. His mother (my mother's mother) said on one occasion that his birth had been harder than the others, and she thought that was when his brain was damaged. When I and she visited him a few years later, before I left home at 15, I got a good look at him for the first time. He was stunningly similar to his father, except that he was just sitting there, rocking back and forth, rocking, rocking.

Decades would go before I heard about autism. Most doctors never knew it either, I am sure. But those were the first pieces to click into place. When I read Al Schroeder's journal (the aforementioned Nova Notes) and got curious about autism. I had read an article about it a few years earlier in Reader's Digest, so I knew that autists don't communicate. That was pretty much all I had noticed back then, when I considered it totally irrelevant to myself and anyone I knew of. Now I learned that many autists spend their days doing simple movements, like flapping their hands ... or rocking back and forth in their chairs.

***

A few days ago I learned about the larger brains of the autists (who are usually boys), and suddenly I am not sure about what is cause and what is effect in my grandmother's case of difficult birth. But there is more.

My grandmother came from a rather intellectual family by our rural standards. Her relatives were well read and the family produced bookish people, some of whom moved to less primitive parts of the country and got jobs that suited their skills. But even locally the Tveit family was considered erudite, except the local farmers would have no idea what erudite meant.

My grandfather was a simple farmer and took no special pleasure in reading except for the local newspaper, which was his life. (Near the end of his life, when his brain finally started to malfunction, he would cite imaginary newspaper articles as proof of his delusions.) He was a thinker rather than a reader, though he did not have the awesome creativity of his father. I think it all began one generation further back than that again, but at school I noticed that all my relatives within a certain range (4 generations I think) were unusually intelligent. We all had an easy time at school, read and wrote better than the rest of the class, and got along well with the teachers. We also had a tendency to sit sideways on our chairs during class. I don't think we all did it, but several of us did and none of the others. The fact that the teachers did not react to this unusual behavior implies that it had been like this for years before I came. Not sure if that matters at all, but it is a weird little thing.

My mother was exceptionally intelligent. In school she was years ahead of her classmates. She would also write poetry for local celebrations. But she never followed an academic path, the way her older sister did. Someone had to take care of the farm and her parents, and she volunteered (sort of). The bright genes then went along to us boys, all four of us having a genius IQ (though I guess it may be fading now that we are growing old). Probably the brightest of us is, ironically, again the one who chose to stay on the farm. His son is the one who is said to have Asperger's Syndrome, a kind of "partial autism". I did notice when I visited me how much he reminded me of myself. That's one reason why I'm not eager to go there again. I think I shouldn't be more explicit than that in a public journal.

***

The final piece was a short news piece that among the Californian autists, a disproportionate number had mothers working in the Silicon Valley information industry. This could possibly indicate that some chemical pollutant was involved ... Brominated Flame Retardants are for instance used to coat computer chips, and new computers release some of this into the air ... but there is another possibility too. Remember, autism is not a mental retardation. Autists have larger brains than average. Some of them have unusual capabilities. And the border between Asperger's and just plain nerds is fuzzy at best, to the extent that I cannot say for sure which of them I am myself.

It is possible that autism is the inevitable results of allowing nerds to breed. Normally, nerds are not the first to have children, or even to have sex. In part this is because they are considered less attractive partners than those who spend their time on sports and social activities. In part it is because they don't have much of a social network. And in part it is because they are less eager, since they have other interests too.

It is not so easy that the information age started a few years ago and suddenly replaced the industrial society. There have been several generations where knowledge became a more and more important part of society's total production. As a result of this, bookish people have had gradually better times. They have expanded and proliferated. And when you purebreed bookish people, you get more and more nerds. Certainly you can be highly intelligent and literate while still being very social. (My best friend comes to mind. She is smarter than me, and has a lot of friends.) But a certain subset of the intellectual develop into nerds.

In Silicon Valley, the nerds rule. They get the money, they get the status. And they wallow in fellow nerds. The tentative conclusion is that when nerds marry nerds, there is an elevated risk of having the ultimate nerd ... the autist.

It is a scary thought that this may be the Omega of human development. But as our humanity started with the consciousness feedback loop, it may be that it must inevitably end in a closed loop, where each brain is locked in itself. I don't think it will get any further than that. The way I understand it, autists have sexual urges too, but they don't see a need to implicate others in the matter. So I guess it ends there.

Autism may simply be a necessary side effect of cultivating the propensity for intense intellectual concentration. In breeding dogs, we have made races with long legs or short legs, perky ears or droopy ears. It is all about what we reward with the right to breed. We believe that among humans, it is all about romance and true love. Yeah, right.