Sunday, July 10, 2016

Science?

The nerdy/geeky types have two obsessions - intelligence, and their self-perceived lack of social skills.  It is therefore a common theme with them that they have self-diagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorders; that autism is also somehow correlated with high intelligence; and that many great minds of the past had some or other Autism Spectrum Disorder. This somehow is very comforting to them.

Then there are the conservative anti-government types, who want to find a genetic basis (and so supposedly immutable) for difference in intelligence - and intelligence to them is a one-dimensional IQ score; they pay lip service only to the idea that intelligence is multi-dimensional, such as Howard Gardner's musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic dimensions. All achievement in life is highly correlated to this IQ according to these theorists. The idea is that immutable genetic differences make all government programs to help the less intelligent poor quite pointless.

Some of these themes come together in this recent paper:
Autism As a Disorder of High Intelligence

The abstract begins (emphasis added):
A suite of recent studies has reported positive genetic correlations between autism risk and measures of mental ability. These findings indicate that alleles for autism overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence, which appears paradoxical given that autism is characterized, overall, by below-average IQ. This paradox can be resolved under the hypothesis that autism etiology commonly involves enhanced, but imbalanced, components of intelligence. This hypothesis is supported by convergent evidence showing that autism and high IQ share a diverse set of convergent correlates, including large brain size, fast brain growth, increased sensory and visual-spatial abilities, enhanced synaptic functions, increased attentional focus, high socioeconomic status, more deliberative decision-making, profession and occupational interests in engineering and physical sciences, and high levels of positive assortative mating.

For the highlighted part, e.g.,
Compared to What? Early Brain Overgrowth in Autism and the Perils of Population Norms

Elsewhere in the paper we see this:
However, a suite of recent studies, described in more detail below, has demonstrated that alleles “for” autism, that is, common alleles that each contributes slightly to its risk, overlap substantially and significantly with alleles “for” high intelligence (Bulik-Sullivan et al., 2015; Clarke et al., 2015; Hill et al., 2015; Hagenaars et al., 2016). To a notable, and well-replicated, degree, then, many “autism” alleles are “high intelligence” alleles. How can these paradoxical observations be reconciled?

When I chase the citations, I go, oh really? If I find the enthusiasm, then you might see more about it here.

Comments (6)

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Sounds like you are claiming that you are not one of the nerdy, geeky types. You do have the pedigree...
3 replies · active 443 weeks ago
I lost the intelligence obsession a long, long time ago. I would have been better off had I never encountered it.
Not sure if you get a pass from nerdville just for that.
I didn't say I wasn't a nerd/geek. I'm just one not obsessed by intelligence. Young people especially should not worry about intelligence or such. They should ask themselves - what is it that they want to do, is it worth doing at some level of effort, and do they have a plan to do it? If there is lack of ability, it will show up in not being able to stick to the plan. "Do I belong to some category devised by an IQmetrician?" should be utterly absent from their minds.
Well, I actually agree with nearly all of that last comment. That said, you have dissed a whole class of people and a whole major area of science with zero evidence.

There are lots of reasons to study intelligence and autism, among them the fact that autism and mental retardation can be crippling diseases that it would be nice to know how to prevent. Beyond such medical reasons, there is the basic motivation of all science - the urge to understand how the world works. It's obvious that humans are a lot more intelligent than our close animal relatives and that this difference in intelligence is linked to the genetic changes which caused the forebrain to increase dramatically over the last 2 million years of evolution.

Does such knowledge have the potential of misuse? Sure, but the pervasive misuse of ignorance seems far more threatening to me.
1 reply · active 443 weeks ago
My original post pointed out the shared increased brain size may not be right, so not exactly zero evidence. I might say more about the genetics later.

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