You might want to adjust for inflation. Have children earlier, maybe? Are there other mental disorders that track with intelligence? There are no other cases of autism diagnosed in the immediate family. The note in the second image mentions adjusting for maternal and paternal age (among other things), and it doesnt look like the adjustment makes an important difference. Many such cases with Aspergers (me too), whereas for high functioning autism the deficit is inverted for processing vs visuo-spatial. In a situation where being outcast from the tribe means that the tribe is going to die instead of the outcast, then the tribe had better learn to put up or shut up. The Western world (taken to mean Europe and the Anglosphere) comprises roughly 1/6th of the global population, which means there should be about 125,000 Westerners who are both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic. We dont have an understanding of how autism exists in the general populace so our data is skewed towards the worst because of where that data comes from. GS-14 speaking, and Im not exactly normal either. But every so often, somebody tries to do . Too much difference from wild type synaptic pruning and youve got pathology in addition to the possible, but not certain, optimization. There is another problem: Giftedness also increases empathy, which in the wrong environment can be a bad thing. Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. There is yet more. r/slatestarcodex Did recent AI . Could you elaborate? Theyre often chatting about the latest sportsball game or what their kids are doing or their vacation plansconversations that wouldnt seem unusual anywhere in the US. the genetic load would be due to bad luck in parent mixing (recessive-recessive pairs) and parent age. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. but heres the thing, I cant come back from the store with six bags of graham crackers and confidently say alright, were gonna make a BUNCH of smores now. To really make a lot, we need all marshmallows, chocolate, AND graham crackersand adding a bunch of one factor does absolutely nothing, and may in fact hinder the whole operationsimilarly, its fallacious to suggest that because some factors dial up, they must all be good things that should be dialed up without limitthat crackling fire is a necessary component, but it doesnt need to go any higherif it does, if we have a big ole bonfire for example, the whole process actually gets harder. The genes that control the development of that definitely dont do so in a linear or easily explainable way. My wife is autistic. The Flynn effect seems to be about raising the floor by building proper sewers and water supplies, eradicating parasites, vaccinating everyone against common childhood diseases, making sure nobody starves and also adding nutritional supplements to foods so brain development isnt stunted by deficiency diseases, eliminating heavy metals from the environment of small children, making sure everyone goes to school, etc. How does age of parents figure in? Spoiler alert: ASD in adults was estimated to be 1%. If you are an expert in X, and the popular understanding of X is X, you will end up having the exact same conversation about X every time. 10 hours ago View Detailed Check-in. Why on Earth one would assume that the effect of genes that contribute to IQ should be linearly additive and increasing to ad infinitum. Some people worry about assortative mating in Silicon Valley: highly analytical tech workers marry other highly analytical tech workers. In the 1800s, the average US man weighed about 155 lbs. That said, I too doubt the extreme male brain hypothesis in a general sense, although it may be true in a more limited sense (where autism consists of more masculine features for certain parts of the brain, but not all of them). Intelligence may be very much the same way. But such an explanation is premature. My wife also has a university degree, her father was an engineer and his 3 siblings had careers in operations research, research scientist, school principal. The Charman et al study finds a correlation between autism and low IQ, by starting with a sample of autistic people and looking at their IQs. paternal IQ/ autism seems pretty much decorrelated, which is strange given the 100% confidence that autism genes are IQ boosting. This is true in a sense, but also alters what we mean by normal. 1), in which the genetic architecture of ASD seems to be different from one individual to another (Huguet et al. People at the higher end of the corporate ladder that Ive met were very intelligent and also seemed generally normal, though of course they had much higher-than-normal ambition, stamina, and interest in their business. Find company research, competitor information, contact details & financial data for AUCHAN RETAIL INTERNATIONAL of CROIX, HAUTS DE FRANCE. We dont let people who are neither smart nor charismatic hang out with us, and people who are both smart and charismatic dont want to hang out with us. Ive certainly known highly intelligent people who did not seem to be crazy or disfunctional in any obvious way. They propose that the reason evolution favors autism genes is that they generally increase intelligence. Thats assuming that we do have a missing group of geniusesIm not sure how we track these things, or who you are counting as a genius. I am getting a vision of the future. Is it kind of like a bimodal distribution, i.e. Ill share some info that might or might be helpful, since its just an anecdote. But it adds the concept of a "safe starch" - where the classic paleo diet has a zero tolerance policy toward carbohydrates, the Perfect Health Diet allows certain carbs like rice, potatoes, and lots of weird things like "taro" and "sago". As a result, we could have similar imbalances. Why is this the case? We just rarely see them because they dont hang out with us losers. She pointed out that there are a couple widely-used kinds of IQ test. Right, genes are NOT good or bad. Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry in the UK on the lack of validity of diagnostic categories in psychiatry http://cepuk.org/unrecognised-facts/diagnostic-system-lacks-validity/). We are both university qualified. But even adjusting for these factors, the autism low intelligence correlation seems too strong to dismiss. The fact that nobody has noticed and studied an effect in a subgroup is evidence that the subgroup does not have a large effect. It would be an excellent skill for a teacher. Is there anything you can do in terms of testing or practice to reduce your risk? But they can only screen for de novo mutations they know about, and it could be that they just missed some. Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. My vague mental model is that there are a bunch of different parameters that have to be within a certain range to get good performance from your brain. Hunter gatherers do eat certain roots and tubers, so it's not . The lectins in wheat interfere with leptin receptors, making people leptin resistant and therefore obese. Theres no reason to assume that every intelligence-enhancing trait necessarily increases weirdness. And so, wed expect that not every person blessed with a strong combination of intelligence-enhancing traits is going to have an excess of weirdness that they have to brute-force emulate their way around. I guess it depends on how you define weirdness; I define it as having interests, beliefs, or though processes that are significantly different than most people I dont think Ive encountered any extremely intelligent people for whom none of the above are the case. If autism makes people less likely to reproduce, why would autism risk genes stick around in the human population? Social relationships are not difficult and people who cannot navigate them are displaying a serious deficit. FWIW, anecdata in the autistic communit suggests that autistic people are more likely than average to be genderqueer in some fashion, but theres no anecdata correlating this with chromosomal sex i.e. Of course, since intelligence and social aptitude seem to have a slight positive correlation, the real number might be closer to 150,000 or 200,000. Shes capable of living without a caretaker, but other than that, the impact on her quality of life seems pretty serious. My outside view intuition is that gut bacteria are the new priming and also literally HTTLPR. My parents were optometrists. Ah, that would explain the discrepancy. This seems a possible explanation, if high-IQ parents have children significantly later, I like the tower explanation, but not so much the different types of intelligences: maybe autism is a combination of rare IQ-boosting alleles inherited from parents, together with high general genetic load (which, among other detrimental effects, decrease IQ, negating the IQ-boosting alleles). And rich people, on average, receive better medical care particularly rich white people. There could be something similar going on with autism. If it is, that could explain some of these results. But they offer a way of grouping types of problem kids that has caught on. I was thinking of Sickle Cell Anemia, where if you get the gene from one parent you are immune to malaria, while if you get from both, your blood cant carry enough oxygen. Maybe the pattern is something like this (calling rare IQ/autism boosting alleles IQb): Combining information from a wide variety of studies, Gaugler et al estimate that about 52% of autism risk is attributable to ordinary familial genes, 3% to rare de novo mutations, 4% to complicated non-additive genetic interaction effects, and 41% unaccounted, which may be non-genetic factors or genetic factors we dont understand and cant measure. If we can isolate these genes for high intelligence theoretically we could duplicate them so that a person might be more certain to have both a normal gene and also a variant gene. And at least a few of them were probably just lying outright. It wouldnt surprise me if whats perceived in higher order terms as stereotypically autistic might be a series of misses on such optimal targets, over- or under- shoots, and then you end up in a situation where a child has difficulty working out how to discard pareidolia from their mental model of the world say just because of a specific kind of synapse oversensitive in some particular way, or later they engage in repetitive behavior instead of altering their mental model to accommodate more unpredictable interactions because it appears more efficient to their brain to conserve the model because of the overstated unpredictability of the alternatives, et cetera. FWIW, Ive only ever heard biological females apply the term genderqueer to themselves. I am known as a word smith (and its an important part of my career, but Im not in journalism). This is just the cystic fibrosis thing again, isnt it? I have many fewer data points on low functioning autistic people, who I have mostly met through church. For such individuals, perfect pitch is almost always the indicator that highly refined processing is available in these areas of immediate reception of sound. i do wish you wouldnt use the phrase autism risk. could equally be applied to people who arent especially intelligent. This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. 4. She has absolute pitch, [] an amazingly high proportion of her autistic students have it to some degree. Blacks have an infant mortality rate more than twice as high as whites do. Draft. It draws on the VPR model of intelligence, where g (general intelligence) is divided into three subtraits, v (verbal intelligence), p (perceptual intelligence), and r (mental rotation ability) despite the very specific names each of these represents ability at broad categories of cognitive tasks. The specific way the model plays out may be through perceptual intelligence out of balance with verbal and rotational intelligence causing autism (3% confidence), (The post is awesome, heres a few errata, feel free to delete this after reading.) About 13% of autistic children (in this sample from whatever social stratum they took their sample from) have fathers who are engineers, compared to only 5% of a group of (presumably well-matched?) So is she a non-serious case? I favour the Maxander description of the genetic defect in autism, too much brain development can be bad. a sort of arrangement where if you pick up to four of them you get enhanced intelligence, five or six and you get high-functioning intelligent autism, and seven or more and your brain crashes on boot-up and the autism stops you from functioning. Yes. do people predisposed to have autistic kids tend to have them later? A lot of people are using social aptitude as a proxy because thats at least something measureable (at least in concept, if not in practice). (When your edit window expires before you submit the edit, it just discards your text and you have to retype it? I imagine the effort you put into fitting in goes down as you get older. Doing some [fundamental] discovery is harder and harder. Other times, the conversations would seem weird as hell in most placesdiscussions of physics or evolution or game theory or genetics or whatever, with a high background level of assumed knowledge. I have not read the other comments, so maybe someone already pointed this out, but I wish to file a complaint. I think its possible that some relatively simple model will be found to explain this relationship, but I also think its possible that the mechanics of intelligence are simply complex enough that the explanation is something inaccessible with our current level of understanding. Go up a level and they can tell you the pitch of your hair dryer. Based on those two correlations, I would be very surprised if it didnt add up to a correlation between predisposition for autism and children later in life. Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. I dont know their actual IQs, but Im very confident a lot of people in my bubble are nice, funny, enjoyable, sports-watching people with 99% intelligence. For example, they may dislike the father for not doing enough when the kid is self-harming from overstimulation. Shes a real handful to deal with and that deters quality men from being interested in her. People with average or above average intelligence and autism are much, much less likely to be diagnosed, because one contributing cause of a diagnosis is seeing a psychiatrist, which is much more likely for people who are having trouble in classes. Any chance its just a matter of recessive genes? (For example, a too-big head would kill mother and baby until modern times; now it just means mom gets a C-section.). i.e. Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). I think the study chosen to show low IQ is really common in autism is a really weird one, and probably a sampling issue. Id say the people in my field are shifted about half a sigma toward introverted, toward socially awkward, and toward tending to become obsessive about their interests/hobbies, but that leaves a lot of people whod seem pretty normal in most ways. I am not particularly confident in the theory either in its parts or in whole. Only 3% of autistic people were found to have IQs above 115, even though 15% of the population should be at this level. If females have a higher average baseline social competence, it would stand to reason that even the impaired girls would remain above the diagnosis threshold in greater numbers. They come from random plants or shiny rocks or stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high. None are autistic, but both boys were a little socially awkwardbasically a couple years behind their classmates in this area. In the graph of relatives, are autists typically on the border or inside of high-IQ regions? Increasingly smart people at the high end, as the smart people tend to meet in college/at work and pair off and have super-smart kids. Evidence suggests the null hypothesis. I.e. 9 hours ago View Detailed Check-in. Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. Increased parental age correlates with autism risk, AIUI. Quite a few trans women seem to be extremely masculine in their interests. I could easily see someone unable to focus, stuck in a room banging their head just trying to make the noise go away. This makes a very strong auditory learner. Well, there is a point, but it takes a long time to grasp it, at which point you are significantly behind people who went along with them without questioning them. But her personal life is a mess. Maintaining or constructing rigorous social boundaries would be the only thing that would protect a human with IQ300 from a human with IQ400 (or a seed AI). Slightly differently: Being gifted makes it harder to take certain things seriously. Theres obviously no reason genetic factors would aggregate in a nice linear fashion in that kind of situation. Let me see if I can dig up one of the studies that I saw mentioned. Every year, we get like 4 or 5 students who are just ready for hardcore abstract mathematics from the get go, and since a few years my university allows them to take masters level lectures as early as they want. Can we quantify the causality going the other way? My wife is dyslexic; Im not. The taller the tower, the stronger the foundation has to be. These questions interest me because I know a lot of people who are bright nerdy programmers married to other bright nerdy programmers, and sometimes they ask me if their children are at higher risk for autism. Intelligence seems much more similar to personality than height in terms of complexity and diversity of manifestations. You can squeeze out a little more gain by filtering just the frequencies that feed back, but if you keep going up it wont take long at all before there are too many to filter. It was my first thought, too admittedly followed by the second thought wait, no, theyll have thought of that one ages ago. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. >The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. I dont think you can model the autism-IQ correlation using a simple additive genetic model. In most GWAS studies there has been little evidence of heterogeneity of association across phenotypic subgroups. Low IQ fathers are less likely to be available due to death/imprisonment/not being around anymore/maybe not even knowing who the father is. (So I dont understand why confidence goes down so much for point 5 in the conclusion of the original post, from 80 to 25 percent.). My vague recollection on this is a large portion of population variance in IQ is additive (like 30 or 40%? no IQb + mgl: normal I think an important possibility to consider is that some or all of the correlation were observing is simply due to bias in the data were using, rather than any actual relationship between high IQ and autism. My first thought when hearing that autism intelligence data is that people are much more likely to end up with the autistic label if theyre disabled. It is often said that male IQ has the same mean as female IQ but greater variance, so you find more men in both tails of the IQ distribution. Im not sure how normal she is, but an acquaintance through RenFaire is head of some Army Corps of Engineers office in the Bay Area, and shes one of the very few people I consider noticeably more intelligent than me. 6 6 6 6 6 marries 6 6 6 6 6, decent chance of getting a 9 9 8 7 9 stone cold genius. I believe autism is largely genetic and the genes that are associated with autism mainly perform functional roles in brain development and brain function. Autism measures may miss more women with autism.. Disguised in that almost is a very slight tendency for fathers to be unusually intelligent, plus a (statistically insignificant) tendency for them to be unusually unintelligent. Highly intelligent people are likely to have different interests, read and talk about different things, than average peopledoes that make them not normal? (Apologies for a machine metaphor that is certainly misleading, but better than anything else than I can think of.). What do you guys think of the recent research linking autism to gut bacteria? Its also a chapter of The 10,000 Year Explosion. Within our filter bubble, people have similar levels of status, so they can be smart but not charismatic or charismatic but not smart. That should give us more geniuses, but not a shift in the distribution where now we get a Gauss/von Neumann/Newton/Kant/Einstein born in every town. With more aggressive screening for such things, we would see a much smaller diagnosis gap. I think somewhere in the 90s percentile of IQ is plausibly normal by SSC standards. How much do we know about how intelligence develops and what might impact it? Id say so. Or the dad may have left or tuned out because he couldnt handle the situation (but could have handled a socially inept kid who wont shut up about WWI airplane models). For that matter, some amazing ingenuity went into ancient engineeringenough so that I think we still dont know exactly how the Incas built Machu Pichu or the Egyptians built the pyramids. I think this is connected to gifted people tend to be good at finding creative solutions to things rather than the most obvious ones, which in the case of weird walking or talking styles can look like autistic behavior. Most of these seem to be related to social ability. Other interesting question if the Flynn effect is more important than genetics and our mean IQ is 15 points higher than 100 years ago: where are all the geniuses? EDIT: To the best of my knowledge, the whole Idiocracy concept (humans are selecting against intelligence because smart people have fewer children) is basically nothing more than a just-so story made up by concerned pseudo-intellectuals. This means autism risk genes must be doing something good. I wonder what human spoken language would be like if that kind of ability were universal. Is it because that is a trait many people here associate with passing for normal? In primary school, for a while we used to have daily spelling tests, where we had to spell ten words. ABA research, like autism research in general, suffers from an appalling lack of rigor. why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? Wheat has been genetically modified recently in ways that make it much worse for you. His auditory channel is very slow and only turns on when you say his name or repeat the question. The line here has an extra close-paragraph symbol, > (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here), which I assume is the one missing from the later section here. And it would also explain why there are many extremely intelligent people who dont have autism at all (you can build arbitrarily tall towers if your foundation is strong enough). Lots of bright nerdy tech-aligned people dont. There are huge practical and financial incentives within our system to diagnose all of these sets of kids with some kind of medicalized disorder, regardless of whether any underlying physical mechanism is understood or present (and sometimes it is, but many different developmental issues can lead you down each of these roads). I dont think 99% would stand out here, but I dont think itd quite be mediocre either. However being homozygous for this new mutation would lead to a person being red-green colorblind. Further (indirect) confirmation of the autism-IQ link comes from evolutionary investigations. If thats the case, if the Flynn effect ever slows down or goes into reverse wed be in quite a bit of trouble, and Scandanavia could be the canary in the coalmine for that process. Improvements in health care thus cause an increase in the number of autistic children born to more affluent families, but whats actually happening is that were just seeing more of them *survive*. The reality is that weight training only increases strength in the motion of the lifts that you do. If youre trying to compare the IQs of parents and children, you need to have both the parents and children, and be sure that the parents are in fact the parents of the children in question. The threshold is probably different for women and men. The Tower vs Foundation model seems to treat intelligence as if its an attribute like height or arm length; the modification of some static variable. -.-). In other words, if your perceptual intelligence is much higher than your other types of intelligence, you will end up autistic. Also, IQ over 70 should be IQ under 70, and people have have autism should be people who have autism. I would hypothesize based on this that autistic people usually have parents who are very good at exactly those areas that they have trouble in. Maybe even only a small fraction of potential arrangements are just right to produce ever-increasing levels of some capability in the phenotype. Higher IQ people have lower infant mortality rates than lower IQ people. My problem with this kind of model is that some people are geniuses but dont have autism. If missing, intelligence develops a lot less/later/incompletely? You don't have to be a diagnosed autist to be like that. Each of us have different stories to share. Two months later, the child started recovering. Obviously it cannot be 100%, but I have not yet encountered one that isnt a narcissist or what the internet calls an autist. Additionally, look at the lives of geniuses throughout American history. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. And since mental traits like intelligence, social aptitude, and self-control are the ones most likely to be selected for in society, it makes sense that our imbalances would primarily be mental. If you get the volume knob too close to the feedback point, the sound will start to behave strangely it will ring weirdly in a way its never done before.