This makes sense. I do feel like intelligence has hard limits. Maybe knowledge doesn't have limits but intelligence definitely feels like it has limits.
If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.
> In summary, we introduce a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation.
I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?
The idea is that the same evolutionary process that rapidly selected human brains for intelligence also selected for autism as a side effect. Perhaps because the genes are proximally linked or it’s just the way brains work or some other random reason.
It is NOT saying that for specific individuals intelligence is correlated with autism. That is actually not the case.
There's an ambiguity in the title, reflected in some comments below. It can be understood either as the claim that "in a particular human being, to be intelligent as measured by IQ means that you are more likely to be autistic", suggesting for example a trade-off between social and general intelligence; or the claim that "the evolution of the human brain and so human intelligence as such, which characterizes both those of low and high IQ, entailed those genetic shifts that made autism a possibility for our species but not other primates." The paper argues a form of the latter.
(I have my own theory, which is that a large brain increases the risk of ADHD rather than autism—a larger flow of thoughts and ideas requires more executive function to manage, and therefore more executive function is required to achieve the same attention span—but that ADHD is a kind of multiplier for autism, because social situations are more challenging to navigate if you can’t reliably stay focused on the social interaction you’re having.)
My father’s (extended) side of the family seems to have once a generation severe autistic case and many of us less severely on the spectrum. Doesn’t seem to exist on my mother’s side with any regularity with similar cohort sizes.
Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.
If your father's side carries some of those sensitizing variants, it could explain both the cluster of traits and the generational occurrence of more severe ASD cases. That actually fits eerily well with the picture this paper is painting
What if it is more like Vegeta's super saiyan 2. A false super saiyan 2 form. Just like the real SS2 maintains both power and agility the real Übermensch will attain new levels of IQ while maintaining if not advancing a strong EQ.
as I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people
I've wondered if it's something akin to an LLM with the wrong temperature or a GPU that's overclocked. If human intelligence is right at the evolutionary bleeding edge you'd expect some proportion of outcomes like that just due to randomness of various kinds.
I'd thought that by living indoors and in otherwise controlled environments that there's not really much evolutionary pressure in any particular direction. Higher intelligence isn't a specific requirement to have (many) children live healthy lives.
Evolution still happens, but in any case if autism is a side effect of the genes that make us intelligent, they are here from much before than central heating and plumbing
I have worked very closely with some autistic people and they were very smart in a human dictionary type way- knew a huge amount of facts but hit a wall very hard with higher levels of abstraction.
Two things I see as required for cutting edge math or physics are intellectual humility and a lot of intuitive feeling for how to approach problems. Another way to say this would be not missing the forest for the trees.
It's kind of wild how the same traits (hyperfocus, detail orientation, pattern sensitivity) can be superpowers in some contexts but limiting in others that require leaps of intuition or comfort with ambiguity
Yeah I am slower, clumsier and somewhat worse with memorizing details but still the person that is called in when there is something novel that requires cutting through multiple levels and using judgement. Though I am extremely thankful for my autistic coworkers since we complement each other as a team.
Perhaps we are seeing evolution unfold in real time. The human brain is under constant pressure from modern life: technology, nonstop information, and increasingly complex social systems. Autism may not be a limitation, but the emergence of a cognitive style better suited to these challenges. Some researchers suggest we are at the beginning of a divergence in human cognition. If so, autism could be one of the first signs of a broader shift in how our brains develop.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 75.0 ms ] threadAs a lifetime member and former officer of Mensa, I know many people with both very high IQ and very high EQ.
If you consider IQ tests, a lot of it is about seeing a sequence and seeing all possible patterns and then figuring out which one is the most certain/obvious based on the limited sample given. One could imagine all sorts of complex patterns beyond the 'correct answer'. But there's a point it loses all utility value. But it's not right either to assume that the most obvious/simplest pattern is always the right one. Not all logic is elegant, especially not when it comes to human matters.
I don't see how the title "Autism may be the price of human intelligence, linked to human brain evolution" is at all related to the paper?
It is NOT saying that for specific individuals intelligence is correlated with autism. That is actually not the case.
There is a parallel strain of argument for the former:
- https://www.tinygnomes.com/qwiki.cgi?mode=previewSynd&uuid=B...
- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-brain-overgrowth-dict...
(I have my own theory, which is that a large brain increases the risk of ADHD rather than autism—a larger flow of thoughts and ideas requires more executive function to manage, and therefore more executive function is required to achieve the same attention span—but that ADHD is a kind of multiplier for autism, because social situations are more challenging to navigate if you can’t reliably stay focused on the social interaction you’re having.)
Lots of PhDs and other left brain super functionals on that side that seems to correlate to intellectual attainment as well.
https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Saiyan_Second_Grade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy
https://opentheory.net/2023/05/autism-as-a-disorder-of-dimen...
Two things I see as required for cutting edge math or physics are intellectual humility and a lot of intuitive feeling for how to approach problems. Another way to say this would be not missing the forest for the trees.
Eg: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8zqoBWBBHD2RjDuS/autism-and...