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Genetic Testing For Geekiness?
Paul Johnson writes "MSNBC is carrying an article wondering about how to handle a possible future genetic test for autism. Raising a severely autistic child is a heartbreaking grind, and many people (and legal systems) consider termination to be a reasonable choice where the fetus carries other genetic disorders such as Downs Syndrome. But this might also prevent the birth of future geniuses too. The article flippantly uses Bill Gates as an example (Gates is widely thought to have Asperger's syndrome), although Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison are also thought to have been similarly "different". And there is some reason to believe that "geekiness" in general is actually the place where autism shades into 'normal'."
Interesting, that those mentioned (Gates, Einstein, Newton), are also classic INTJ personalities...
;)
http://www.typelogic.com/intj.html
I am too, btw, so I can count myself among some good company... but then am I likely to have Asperger's as well?
The "Geek Syndrome" Wired article even gives the tendency a name: "stoppage".
He's a great kid. My sister says he's about as hard as two kids, because of his 'special needs' but she also tells me that it's at least twice as rewarding to see the results. He was 2.5 Yrs old when he learned to walk. They REALLY celebrated when he crossed that milestone. It was a big deal because it was the culmination of months of physical therapy, long labors and battles of will with him. Was it worth the work? She says, undoubtedly!
Today he's a sixth-grader working at grade level in all subjects. He can do what other kids do, it simply requires harder work. He's a joy to be around, and he's a very thoughtful and compassionate kid.
I'm quite glad that he was not killed prenatally. I commend you for your choice, and while the road ahead may be difficult, it's a good road to be on.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
it's noble, and all that. but nobody should be forced to live with an avoidable anomalous situation and accept it as "god's will", as not everyone believes that.
I said nothing about "god's will", I believe. Niether of us are overtly religious.
it's noble, and all that. but nobody should be forced to live with an avoidable anomalous situation and accept it as "god's will", as not everyone believes that.
Make no doubt about, people who abort because of a Downs Syndrome diagnosis are not doing so at 8 weeks, they are doing so at 22, 24, 30, even 32 and 34 weeks, when the child is developed to an amazing degree, and in many cases could survive outside the womb with no medical care, no life support, and no special treatment. My daughter is 33 weeks, coming up on 34, and without much of a doubt could survive handily with only minimal extra-care at this point. We are well past a "clump of cells".
My point is and was that viewing a birth defect in your child or a handicap in someone as a "problematic situation" that needs to be cured is really not right in my view, and that it's a sad thing when a culture gets to the point that a life is worthless and not worth living without being physically perfect from the day you are born.
And it can only lead to more and more depravities.
Especailly with Downs Syndrome, of all things, which allows people to still live healthy, happy, productive lives.
Current estimates place someone with Asperger's Syndrome in every few hundred people. TFA doesn't do a good job of pointing out that Asperger's is what they call "high functioning autism", meaning that most of those with it can function and blend in with society if they choose to.
The correlation seems so reasonable to me, it's barely worth mentioning. I would speculate that a typical layperson definition of geek would be "An intelligent, but socially awkward person. A loner." Autism literally means self-ism. "One who is drawn into one's self."
Given the site you're reading now, I'd say odds are pretty good that you're working with someone that has some form of autism. They probably forgot to mention it to you.
Actually, it isn't absolutely true. Empirical studies show no correlation between intelligence and happiness. Highly intelligent people are neither more nor less likely to be happy than anyone else.
Of the thousands of 2-variable combinations involving biologically relevant variables, the combination with the highest Pearson correlation with autism (60%) rates was the one I predicted based on my experiences observing children developing autism in Silicon Valley:
Finns Percapita * Immigrants from India Percapita
(Please note that "autism spectrum disorders" is a poorly standardized diagnostic category whose reproducibility may be little better than 60%. Even if one identified the specific pathogenic agent causing autism, to which a specific set of genes were susceptible, and were able to test the entire population, it is quite plausible that present diagnostic standards would be little better than 60% at predicting who would have those factors and who wouldn't.)
Furthermore, both of these demographies, alone have a Pearson correlation of only 42%(+-1%) which is again what one would expect if the conjunction of two variables were required for the etiology of autism.
See this link.
(Oregon and Massachusetts are excluded as data points due to their being the States with the highest and lowest autism percapita rates respectively. Failing to exclude these datapoints creates the impression that the best correlation is with nonWestern immigration to industrial regions, rather than immigration from India per se to regions of Finnish ancestry.)
Adding economic data there was only one combination of variables that exceeded this and it did so by just 1% (r=61%). It is weakly supportive of the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis. It is not strongly supportive due to the fact that while working parents percapita was one of the 2 variables, the other variable was public education expenditure per student which had, by itself, a Pearson correlation of 54% whereas working parents percapita was only 25% -- indicating the vast majority of the variance in autism rates was explained by public education expenditure per student rather than working parents. There are a number of possible explanations for why public education expenditure per student would be correlated with autism percapita, among them the most obvious being simply that a high cost of education is associated with autism spectrum disorders.
See this link.
MMR vaccination rates show virtually zero correspondence with autism rates. When viewed in combinations with other demographic variables, it came in combinations far from the top -- far enough from the top that it is plausible that such correlations are due to chance or due solely to the other variable.
Mercury has also been hypothesized as a factor in autism, however data from the Environmental Protection Agency on percapita water-way mercury pollution by State fails to show a significant correlation with autism.
Seastead this.