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Re:In search of a truce in the autism wars by dooglius on Thursday May 02, 2019 @05:53PM (#19813348)
Well, I think one issue is that evolution acts on base-pair mutations and not traits. So (to wildly make a possibility up) suppose that mutations X, Y, and Z are each individually beneficial, but having all of them at once gives you autism. Then the population probably converges on a distribution that has some nonzero probability of X, Y, and Z.
Re:In search of a truce in the autism wars by keenmaster on Thursday May 02, 2019 @06:36PM (#19813635)
That’s another 100% plausible evolutionary explanation. Autism is caused by genes that correlate with intelligence, which is positive for evolutionary fitness. If you get a certain mixture of those genes, you get autism. That won’t stop the genes from propagating though.