If I'm following your argument correctly, you're suggesting that treating autism as a spectrum is really just lumping together people with actual, severe autism with people who are just more intelligent than average. That's not how it works. Autistic spectrum disorders come with issues with sensory processing[1], planning, actually eating, actually doing anything, social interaction, and a whole bunch more, for pretty much everyone as far as I can tell including the well-paid, successful software developers. The fundamental thing determining where someone is on the spectrum is how able they are to convince people they're "normal", for whatever value of normal is seen as most important. (This is a common enough misconception that some of the more politically active folks even had a hashtag, #SoHighFunctioning, mocking it.)

[1] More specifically, with handling sets of sensory stimuli that society expects everyone to be able to cope with. It's a somewhat open question to what extent "disability", in this case, means "different from what society expects". (Oddly enough, I don't think this even used to be part of the official diagnostic criteria despite being really common.)

No, being slightly autistic doesn't make you more intelligent, but it makes you use that intelligence differently. If you consider the dichotomy between "fast" and "slow" thinking, my hypothesis is that mild autism causes you to think slowly more often. This can be both useful and harmful, but in many modern professions it's advantageous.

I think there's a contradiction here.

In selecting for intelligence a harm is acquired: the risk of sevre autism.

So "simplistic perception" is not correct. By selecting for intelligence, we incidentally acquire a problem.

> In selecting for intelligence a harm is acquired: the risk of sevre autism.

Not sure what you mean here. You can have simultaneous selection for and against 'autism spectrum disorder', if it is heterogeneous. If for example it is a mix of actual social dysfunctionality/brain damage and greater intelligence/abstracting/systematizing, you could have selection against the former and selection for the former, and the net measured effect on the mixture could go either way.

(This is not as odd as it sounds. We seem to see something very similar with the Neuroticism trait: the overall trait appear bad for you, which makes sense since it's usually seen as not very good to have a lot of, but if you break it down into its 'facets', some of them are good for you: "Genetic contribution to two factors of neuroticism is associated with affluence, better health, and longer life" http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/06/146787 , Hill et al 2017. It's analogous to how there are minimal sex differences on Big Five personality when examined at the Big Five factor level, but when broken down to their sub-factors, sex differences jump out at you.)

> By selecting for intelligence, we incidentally acquire a problem.

That is directly at odds with the analysis in the Grove et al. paper; the genetic basis of increased educational attainment is distinct from that associated with 'severe' autism.

I think this is a case of wanting to see patterns that aren't necessarily there; we'd like to see a nice even spectrum of behavior, with undesirable extremes at the ends. It's a nice reductive interpretation of complicated data. The problem is that it doesn't seem to fit. At least so far; genomic studies are very useful, especially as a starting point, but ultimately mechanistic explanations that generate testable genetic hypotheses are the gold standard for biology. And for good reason.

Still, given that what evidence exists does suggest a different framework, I'd be very hesitant to conclude that there is a trade-off.

Some relevant snips from that paper:

> We find that the observed excess in ASD subjects of alleles positively associated with education attainment is confined to Asperger’s and childhood autism, and it is not seen here in atypical autism nor in other/unspecified PDD.

In simple terms: looking broadly, there appears to be meaningful genetic differences between diagnoses of childhood autism and Asperger's vs. pervasive developmental disorders (in lay terms, I'd call this 'full blown autism'). Basically, the genetic stuff that's linked to educational attainment is different from the stuff that leads to 'severe' autism.

This is especially interesting because these potentially 'good' and 'bad' traits are likely affecting the same time and location of development:

> Interestingly, both common and rare variation in ASD preferentially affects genes expressed during corticogenesis, highlighting a potential spatiotemporal convergence of genetic risk on this specific developmental epoch, despite the disorder’s profound genetic heterogeneity.

Worth noting that this is a pretty significant paper and serves as a solid foothold for the 'not a trade-off' interpretation of intelligence vs. autistic behavior. I.e., the latter is not necessarily a consequence of 'too much' of the former.

"Being able to think logically and systematically" is not a symptom of ASD.

Look: simply being smart is not in and of itself a symptom of ASD. There are a number of symptoms associated with the spectrum that actually have very little to do with intellectual ability. It's inappropriate and factually wrong to make the statement that logical and systematic thinking is symptomatic of ASD.

"think logically and systematically" is a rather bizarre way of describing all the symptoms of ASD, which are behaviors that are definitely not what we would think of as intelligent behavior.

Look into the scale in question. We're not talking about crippled mute kids banging their heads into walls or attacking their teachers.

It holds true also for high functioning autists. Inability to control emotions or evwn recognize them a.k.a. angry outbursts over small inconvenience/not getting your way/etc is one of symptoms for example.