Mental Health Aspergers?

[Markomarkh]

Are Aspergers the next step in human evolution, the normal people are the new Neanderthal and will die out eventually?

 

[ahint]

Nah, evolution just is, it's just descent with modification, it's not a force with an end plan.

Autism spectrum or not, we're all valuable and have lives worth living.

 

[Mysterie]

perhaps add some supporting statements such as why you could see people with aspergers as being the next step in human evolution.

social intelligence is one of the primary factors of our survival through history and perhaps not so much now. but its still a big factor in our ability to thrive in society.

how having a condition which directly impacts ones ability to socially interact is a boon to survival is beyond me.

 

[JessFR]

I doubt it. I'll preface this by saying I don't actually know an enormous amount about Asperger's syndrome, but I know it involves significant difficulties with social interactions and understanding.

Our species, in fact all the smartest species, are smart because high intelligence is needed comprehend the complex social relationships in highly social animals. Now of course this isn't to say having bad social skills is a mark of low intelligence. As we all know people with aspergers are often highly intelligent. Just that in the evolutionary sense, the long term survival of our species requires that we BETTER understand each other. We need to improve our ability to empathize with and understand each others motivations. And for our species especially, having poor social skills is a severe handicap, not only for reproduction but much much more. You won't be the next step in evolution if the step makes it less likely that you'll attract members of the opposite sex for mating.

I agree with mysterie, it might help if you provide some additional reasoning for why you think people with aspergers might have an advantage in evolutionary fitness over the current average person.

 

[Foreigner]

That's not how evolution works, at least on paper.

We aren't all going in one direction. Each generation creates millions of slight variations in people. Humans that successfully breed pass on their variations, and over a long time if those variations survive, they become more dominant traits. This is called random selection.

Asperger's may be one of those variations, or maybe not. It's hard to say. The rate of children on the autistic spectrum has increased in the past 50 years, and especially in the last 20. One dominant theory is the way babies are born, with micro-damage to their brains from all the mechanical devices and drugs used in hospitals to "assist" birth. The other major theory is the lack of gut flora diversity causing neuro-behavioral problems. A lot of children on the autistic spectrum become higher functioning when their diets are reformed.

 

[JessFR]

Truth is we don't really know why yet. And the enormous number of retards who imagine causes and imagine even more treatments and cures only make the reality harder to determine.

I wonder what the birth rate for people with aspergers is like compared to the norm.