I'm fascinated by it too. We've seen a LARGE uptick in autistic children - from level 1 to 3 - since I started teaching. I want to know what causes it, how to improve my skills in teaching children who do not communicate like other children and if there are any kind of remedies that might alleviate any symptoms. It is heartbreaking to see the kids who scream almost all day, cannot have typical relationships with their peers, cannot eat on their own, take care of themselves. And then more in the middle of the spectrum, I want to know what's going on in the brains of those kids who do not speak at all, but can spell words well beyond their age level, can match countries with their flags, can write in other languages. I find all of it incredibly fascinating.
What if what "causes it" is evolution?
A modern infant would have been seen by any preceding or contemporary Homo species as mentally and physically deficient for years of its life. Homo Sapiens sapiens infants are helpless at birth to defend themselves, can't hold their heads up, take months if not years longer to walk well and communicate, can't crawl or creep at birth, have an instinct but no ability to cling and be able to hold onto a moving mother, develop quite tiny and comparatively weak teeth, and likely would have been seen as hopelessly disabled. It's theorized that many infants born in such an utterly helpless, indeed basically fetal condition were exposed to the elements or directly euthanized, potentially holding up reproduction via and population of H. sS as a "new" species thousands of years longer than it could have taken otherwise.
In reality, we simply have a far longer infant and toddler stage, which has ended up being a benefit, not a "disorder." Infants born helpless must be attended to constantly by the mother. Some researchers colloquially call our first three months "the fourth trimester." (Notably, that wouldn't be a trimester at all, for obvious reasons.) And for years after that, we must continuously have adults around us. This has meant constant interaction with adults (stimulation by minds more developed than ours simply by virtue of maturity), causing us to reach to understand. And because childhood lasts such a long time, we have years to mentally develop because we don't have to start surviving on our own at 4 or 5 years of age.
Autism is seen as "a deficit," and not "being able to" fit in with the rest of society. But society is for the large part at an emotional and yes, mental evolutionary standstill. We have more tech at our fingertips, and education at our disposal, but we are not necessarily "smarter."Just as some mothers must have kept and raised their little ones in borderline pre-H. Ss species, we today have supports for autistic people and no longer hide them away in some upstairs room. So.autism is no longer selected against naturally, as autistic people are cared for and urged to be in society even if they seem "different."
On the one hand natural selection is supposed to take a very, very long time, not mere centuries. On the other hand, we have evidence of evolutionary "leaps" (in various ways).
Who's to say there's something deficient about autistic people, outside of society's lack of acceptance of it and rush to "fix" if?
What if we're torturing our kids with overstimulation, tests and studies, constantly playing around with their diets because that might be "the problem," "detoxing" them with the latest weird fad, and not vaccinating them and allowing them to get pretty darned sick (or die) for no reason at all?
