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When Geeks Meet, Are They More Likely To Have Autistic Kids?
An anonymous reader writes "Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks scientists and engineers could be more likely to have a child with autism, an idea that is fairly common currency in Silicon Valley. But many researchers say the proof isn't there yet. From the article: 'Baron-Cohen proposes that systemizing ability can be inherited — and that in information-technology (IT) enclaves such as Silicon Valley, where hypersystemizers are more likely to meet, pair off and have children, the result is a higher incidence of autism. Back in 1997, for example, he concluded that fathers of children with autism were more than twice as likely to be engineers as were fathers of non-autistic children. But autism researchers ... found that fathers of children with autism were more likely to work in medicine, science and accountancy, as well as engineering, and less likely to have manual occupations. They suggested that these fathers were simply more likely to have reached a higher level of education. Baron-Cohen says that when he reanalysed the data and controlled for education level, he found that fathers of children with autism were still more likely to be engineers, although the difference was smaller.'"
If it were true, that would imply that when geek guys meet geek girls, they get it on, instead of just looking awkwardly at each other.
I am officially gone from
Who else said, "wait, is that Ali G?"
As I trust Wikipedia 100%, they are surely cousins :D
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
And I don't recall meeting a single kid that had a "peanut allergy" before a public hysteria began over it.
Yeah, that's because they all died when they ate their first peanut butter & jelly sandwich.
Unfortunately that doesn't dissuade Internet marriage proposals; my scraggly brown locks do nothing to protect me. I would share, but an independent review board of ethicists told me I probably shouldn't. (Also, "blond" is masculine, "blonde" is feminine. Unless you were trying to imply that Linus Torvalds gets a lot of marriage proposals?)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
When I was a kid 24.679 years ago I had 4 kids in my 9am class with special needs, 2 in my 10 am class, 6 in my 11 am class, and 5 in my noon class. I had an average of 4.25 kids with special needs in my classes. There was only a 0.003% mention of incidence of autism on a daily sliding window basis but that didn't matter because we all got the same number of pencils, exactly 1 per week for the school year for 36 weeks of school, but on leap years we didn't get an extra 0.00555 pencils which I thought was wrong, nor did anyone take into account the total length of carbon trace each of us used or the exact pressure each of used pushed with.
When I was a kid we didn't have autism.