I post a lot about the idea that schizophrenia and autism are in some ways opposites.  Although the two conditions have a common genetic link, there’s also research showing they are genetic opposites on a certain continuum.  Autism has been described as extreme male brain, while schizophrenia has been described as extreme female brain.

I have also suggested other ways they are opposites (though some of these are kind of speculative).

a) autistics tend to come from high social classes while schizophrenics tend to come from lower social classes

b)autistics tend to have cold climate ancestry while schizophrenics tend to have warm climate ancestry

c)autistics tend to be good at math and science while (premorbid) schizophrenics tend to be good at art and people

d)autistics tend to be trusting while schizophrenics tend to be paranoid

e)autistics tend to be atheists while schizophrenics sometimes think they are Jesus

Well it seems, eminent scientists increasingly see autism and schizophrenia as opposite ends of a spectrum. About 35 minutes into the youtube video below, a scholar discusses a neurological continuum: blind variation vs selective retention.

Schizophrenics rank high on the former while autistics are at the opposite extreme.  The theory seems to be that blind variation is needed for generating hypotheses while selective retention is useful for focusing in on the right ones.

I’ve noticed that some of the most aggressive critics of behavioral genetics blogs like this one, tend to be on the schizophrenic end of the continuum.  I believe their aggression towards us is an evolutionary strategy. In prehistoric times, they would have simply killed anyone with an autistic type rational personality allowing their schizophrenic genes to thrive at the expense of autistic genes, but in civilized times, they just verbally attack.

Of course us autistic types also have attack dogs.  Witness all the pro-science blogs devoted to attacking anyone who is paranoid about big pharma or believes in alternative medicine or spirituality.

PS: The above video is well worth watching in its entirety.  Among other interesting points the scholars make is that the greatest novelists in the World would have an average IQ of about 120.  The reason given is that the type of talents needed to be a great novelist (i.e. insight into human nature) are not measured by IQ tests.  I actually think they’d average in the 130s because of the verbal component of good writing, and because regardless of whether a specific mental ability like social insight is directly measured by IQ tests, it’s still indirectly measured by g.

In an earlier post I had estimated that on an IQ scale where the general U.S. population has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, autistics have a mean of 72 with an SD of 23. So although the average autistic is much less intelligent than the average neurotypical, their greater variability makes them over-represented among the greatest minds.

However my analysis was based on diagnosed autistics. It’s entirely possible that there’s a large population of autistics who escape diagnosis, and this group likely has a much higher average IQ than the diagnosed autistics because they were too high functioning to be diagnosed with a mental problem. In other words, diagnosed autistics are not a random sample of autistics.

How could one get a random sample of autistics? Find a random sample of Americans and give all of them a brain scan. Only those who scored autistic on the brain scan would be considered autistic, regardless of any diagnostic or behavioral history. If this were done, we would likely find the average autistic IQ to be much higher than 72 since such a sample might include many high income computer geeks, university professors and many scientists.

A major problem with autism research is that unlike other medical conditions, autism is diagnosed using questionnaires. Can you imagine if we diagnosed obesity, not by taking precise physical measurements, but by asking people “do you feel fat? Do you have trouble finding clothes that fit?”. Sure, this would have some validity and correlate with obesity to some degree, but it would also have a lot of error.

Because the definition of autism is so imprecise, people are able to claim that there is an autism epidemic, giving rise to the dangerous myth that vaccines might cause autism.

Even people as brilliant and influential as Hillary Clinton have spread this myth. For example in 2008, Hillary Clinton wrote that she was “committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines.”

This is another reason why HBD denial is so dangerous. HBD deniers are always looking for environmental causes of mental traits like autism, because they don’t want to admit that behavior has a large genetic component. They would rather falsely blame vaccines, than genes, especially if it wins them political points.

And when nerdy scientists try to correct these misconceptions with actual research, many side with the charismatic politicians and claim the research is flawed. But autism research would be a lot harder to dismiss if it was based on actual brain scans, not the current method of diagnosing autism.

Fortunately a fascinating study found that brain scans can diagnose autism with 97% accuracy. That’s an astonishing result, because even a perfect test of autism could not predict who was diagnosed with autism with more than 90% accuracy, because the diagnosis itself can’t even be that accurate! Now admittedly the sample size was small, but if the results are even close to accurate, future research on autism should use brain scans, not whether someone’s been diagnosed, because the people who get diagnosed are likely a non-random sample of autistics. There are likely many autistics who have never been diagnosed because they’re too high functioning. For example, some have speculated that even people as successful as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates might have aspergers (a form of autism).

Bill Gates is one the most vocal major critics of the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, and the doctor who advanced it, telling CNN:

…Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

If I were Bill Gates I would use the Gates foundation to conduct the first true expiriment on vaccines and autism. I would go to a foreign country with a very low vaccination rate and randomly select a thousand children to provide with vaccines, clean water and health care, and randomly select a control group of a thousand children that received only clean water and health care. Obviously it would be unethical of the study to prevent the control group from being vaccinated, but that doesn’t mean the study has to provide vaccination for the control group, which would defeat the purpose.

Then when the children were older, I would scan the brains of both the experimental group and the control group to prove to the deniers what scientists already know: Vaccines do not cause autism.

The blogger Santoculto, recently mentioned an article claiming autism genetic variants are linked to high IQ. This is consistent with my view that autistic traits are more highly evolved and thus are more common among higher social classes and probably the highly evolved Mongoloid race. By contrast, my theory also states that schizophrenic traits are more primitive, and thus linked to lower social class and peoples of sub-Saharan ancestry.

Although it’s important to note that autistics themselves tend to have low IQ, though their IQ distribution is more variable, so autistics are over-represented among both the most brilliant and the most retarded. But the key point is that autistics tend to have high IQ relatives, suggesting that the genetic variants related to autism are somehow linked to high IQ. The common link is probably nerdiness. Both high IQ people and autistic people tend to be nerdy, so genetic variants for nerdiness cause autism and IQ to be genetically related.