blog
07/16/2008
is autism a stage in evolution?
Posted by Steve Woolf

Please watch this video. It's been around the 'net for a while. It's the story of a man named Daniel Tammet, who can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head. He has been diagnosed with a form of autism, but one with a relatively mild affect on the way he handles social interaction. Typically autistics have trouble relating to other people and things in their environment, but can demonstrate an ability to focus on single tasks. This rarely manifests itself as true savant-like abilities, but for a while now I have started to wonder whether the escalation in autism diagnoses over the past 30 years is a result of environmental effects on children, or whether this is nature experimenting with us to take us to the next stage of evolution.

This is in no way intended to make light of the effect that autism can have on people and their families. In fact, there is great debate within the culture of autism -- the medical professionals, the families, and the autistics themselves -- whether autism is a condition rather than a disorder.

The pathology of the brains of autistics shows clusters of excess neural connections in localized parts of their brains. This causes a lot of what appears to be the compulsive behaviors of autistics, the repetitive and ritualistic tendencies, and what can appear to be a detachment with normal life and social interaction.

But occassionally, these clusters can bestow amazing gifts. There are autistics who can draw landscapes in three dimensions having seen only pictures of the subject, showing an ability to imagine and extrapolate an environment based on pure instinct. And Daniel Tammet, the subject of the video embedded above, learned one of the world's most difficult languages in a week.

So I feel the need to wonder, is nature experimenting with us? Will there be a point in the future where we will all have savant-like abilities, with godlike levels of focus and ability? Or is autism really just some kind of disorder where brain development has gone wrong or misfired somehow?