Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Human Evolution and Autism

I wish to test a general theory for human evolution and would be interested in any bodies views with an interest in the field of evolutionary psychology.

The model for human evolution centres on the existece of two basic human personalities. These personalities were formed at different times in evolution. The first of these personalities was formed in a period of great austerity. People lived in single family groups widely spread out in a virtual desert environment. This existence formed the human family of a man a woman and children along with the concept of monogamy. Antisocial behaviour ensured survival of the race and the personality desrcribed with autistic tendencies was formed by the process of natural selection.
After this period came much improved climatic conditions. In this environment large game came to roam the plains and we see the evolution of the tribe. In the tribe most of the normal human social characteristics were formed by the process of natural selection. This enabled people to naturaly function together as a group.
The twist in the human story is that both the original human personality with autistic characteristics and the tribal human personality have survived to form our species.

Dylan wrote:
"The model for human evolution centres on the existece of two basic human personalities. <snipped> People lived in single family groups widely spread out in a virtual desert environment."

Where did you get this as it is absolutely untrue. Humans historically have lived in tribes and on coasts and in savanahs ... not in the desert.

I'd like to see any reasonable justification for why you loaded the question with something that seems untrue. Give a decent answer and you will get a decent response. Your assumption about autism seems to come out of the aether.

First--why don't you define what you mean by autistic tendencies. I can't think of an environment where what I think of as autistism would be any advantage at all.

Thank you for your replies

You perhaps have never heard of Asperger's Syndrome but if you have you might find the idea I have of interest. This syndrome is a bit like a mild form of autism to put it in the simpliest of terms. When you look at the characteristics of the syndrome I think it can be explained as normal natural behaviour if not everybody actually evolved in a sociable tribe. I feel this a more likely explanation for the syndrome than evolutionary human tribal characteristics having disfunctioned in some way.
The idea that all people evolved in a tribe doesn't really fit how people live today. We live in single families. I believe this is a natural group structure from evolution. To get this group structure we need an austier environment that will not support a tribe of people. Now I think this period occured and created the homo-sapien in East Africa. We started as single families and later in evolution evolved to live in tribes and developed the commonly recognised human social characteristics. However not everybody followed this path of evolution. The ancestors of people that have Aspergers Syndrome remained in single families and their descendants never naturally inherited the social characteristics that would make a group of people function together naturally as a tribe.
If you have ever heard of the syndrome you might like to let me know what you think. I think there are two normal human personalities.

From http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/aswhatisit.html

"Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest."

Let's assume there's an ancient population of people with Asperger's syndrome. I don't see how a group of people with Asperger's would be adaptable to changing environmental conditions, or who would be able to take advantage of new environments and food sources. Someone with AS in a population of normal humans might be an asset to that group, however.

Given that we have zero evidence for this, all we can do is imagine what I think Gould referred to as "just-so stories" in an attempt to put a scenario together to explain the existence of a trait.

Thank you soilguy

If I were to tell you how obsession and anti social behaviour served evolutionary purpose would you be interested. Obsession is a neccesary human characteristic where the obsessive search for food was neccesary for survival. Social skills would not evolve if there were no people to socialise with. There would be no evolutionary cause for them. The desire for sameness would come if there was little change in the daily routine with the search for food dominating behaviour. I think the ancient population of AS people were more than that. Every homo sapien was AS to start with. The other human characteristics evolved later in the tribe.
It is true the environment would change but this would be an extremely gradual process from the human perspective.
I think your right a person with AS would be an asset to a group and I believe they were much more than that. The characteristic of obsession was the driving force behind development and is so today. If you think about all the great people in history obsession is the characteristic that drove them.
I am interested looking in to human history where we will find no bones to study. The evidence comes from modern human behaviour. My view is that this behaviour has been programmed into us through the process of natural selection. As for taking things too seriously I believe that the concept that AS is a disorder has been taken too literally. The origins of the concept that it is a disorder are doubtful to my mind. The work came out of the Third Reich in the Second World War when all sorts of dubious ideas about human beings abounded.
I am interested in thinking which is what we human beings do. And I wish to question our current thinking.

Dylan wrote:
"If I were to tell you how obsession and anti social behaviour served evolutionary purpose would you be interested. Obsession is a neccesary human characteristic where the obsessive search for food was neccesary for survival."

It seems to me you are torturing the language. Obsession, by definition, is crossing the psychological barrier that separates reasonable from unreasonable. Obsessively hunting for food would be hunting for food when:

A) There was plenty on hand and no value in finding more at the moment.

B) There were other more important things that needed to be done and that were not done due to searching for food. For example a need to find shelter from a blizzard.

You have determined your conclusion in advance, planeted the arrow, and now you are painting the target. I see nothing in what you have written that overcomes your apparent prejudice toward that predetermined conclusion.

Thank you for your views
I am trying to test a model for human evolution and so you would be right in saying that I do have a predetermined conclusion in mind. That conclusion can not be proved only disproved Which is what I am asking people to do. To my mind we have two senarios in our evolutionary story.
We have everybody evolving in a tribe and developing tribal human behaviour. People with autistic characteristics inexplicably have some sort of mental disfunction whereby all those natural tribal characteristics have been lost. This perhaps resembles current thinking. In the senario I am presenting for test those tribal characteristics did not evolve in the first place in the autistic type personality.
what do you think could it be right?

Dylan wrote:
"I am trying to test a model for human evolution"

That is not as it appears to me.

Dylan wrote:
"We have everybody evolving in a tribe and developing tribal human behaviour."

I find this faulty at its most basic premise. You seem bound an determined to justify a value in autism for which there can be no basis in making a decision one way or the other. But here's what I find most invalid in your thinking.

You make the assumption that we do not live, today, almost exactly the way we lived as Australopitecines or even prior to that point in time. My guess is that we have been social animals, living in tribal colonies, from at least the time when we were being eaten by dinosaurs. That our social structures are not substantially different, even today, from those of he Bonobo.

In short ... you are torturing the English language and the scientific method by shooting the arrow and then painting the target. Why don't you try science by the scientific method instead of what appears to me to be at best laziness.

But look at our fellow primates. Do you see any who choose a solitary existence? I can't think of any, offhand. It also seems unlikely that modern humans suddenly appear in a population of "lower primates," and become outcasts. It appears far more likely that our desire to be with others of our kind pre-date our species.

It is true the environment would change but this would be an extremely gradual process from the human perspective.

That can't be said with any certainty. Both gradual and catastrophic changes in environment have occurred throughout geologic history.

I think your right a person with AS would be an asset to a group and I believe they were much more than that.

I think you have to go with the more mundane scenario, that people with AS are often not a problem for society, and are sometimes a benefit. As an old professor I had once said, "Don't look for a zebra when a horse will do." You would need to prove that humanity went from anti-social to social after our species first appeared. You'd also need to show that anti-social behavior, obsessiveness and strong resistance to change are good strategies for an individual's survival. You have to rule out the horse before strongly suspecting the zebra.


The characteristic of obsession was the driving force behind development and is so today. If you think about all the great people in history obsession is the characteristic that drove them.

I would guess that the clinical definition of "obsessed" is a lot different from the common one we use in everyday language. I have an "obsession" with growing certain flowers. However, my neighbor has a true obsessive-compulsive disorder that causes him to take 4 hours to mow his lawn (1/4 acre lot, runs over the same patches of grass repeatedly), and detail his 25 year old car every day (weather permitting). (Incidentally, the car is one that will never be considered a classic.)

I am interested looking in to human history where we will find no bones to study. The evidence comes from modern human behaviour. My view is that this behaviour has been programmed into us through the process of natural selection. As for taking things too seriously I believe that the concept that AS is a disorder has been taken too literally. The origins of the concept that it is a disorder are doubtful to my mind. The work came out of the Third Reich in the Second World War when all sorts of dubious ideas about human beings abounded.
I am interested in thinking which is what we human beings do. And I wish to question our current thinking.

There is nothing wrong with having a hunch or belief that you'd like to investigate. But having an unwavering belief in something, in spite of a lack of evidence or evidence against the belief, is unlikely to lead you to the truth.

Exactly. Maybe I should have read this before I wrote my last post. The only reason that I can see for Dylan's hypothesis is his desire that it be true.

I agree. My guess is that he has read the stories about Einstein and Bill Gates having minor autistic tendencies and has decided to take up a crusade.

Few crusades, though, aren't based on torture. Some torturing people, others torturing logic and the language.

thank you for your observations I do appreciate them.
If I take the characteristic of obsession first. Soilguy mentions he has an obsession growing certain flowers and his neighbour has an obsession with mowing his lawn and looking after his car. To me the obsessions might be different and one person may judge the other persons obsession to be abnormal however that is simply dependant on the perspective taken. Soilguy considers his neighbours obsession to be compulsive obsession and his neighbour perhaps thinks the same about him. Both the activities of growing certain flowers and the excessive mowing of lawns can appear to have no purpose although I suspect excesive mowing is probably a bit more irritating. Underneath there is the human characteristic of obsession. My hypothesis is that this characteristic is normal for the species and has been formed by evolution. It can also be noted I think that obsessive people can struggle to get along which would make for a rather fractious tribal group.

Taking DA Morgan's hypothesis that we have always lived as tribal colonies I think gets us at the crux of the matter. All the work I have seen hypothesising human evolution has this assumption at its centre. This is where autistic tendencies come into my alternative scenario. Here we have anti social people. The common view would be that they have a disorder and that makes them behave the way they do.
When however we look at Asperger's Syndrome for instance we do not have a scientifically observable cause. With Downs syndrome on the other hand we do have a observable difference in chromosone pattern from the norm. There is a scientifically observable cause for this syndrome. Why is that?
If my scenario is correct then the we would perhaps have to be looking for a million slight variations in genetic coding to identify the difference for autism. We would then have to link those variations together and explain how they all went wrong at the same time. I do not believe this is likely to be possible.
There are other human characteristics that do not support the view that we are all descended from a tribal group. We have the concept of monogamy which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. My evolutionary cause for monogamy is that both parents are needed to be bonded together for the duration of child rearing. I do not see evolutionary cause for this in a tribal group where food is shared between the group.
We also have the human concept of personal capitalism which is in effect the the aquisition of personal assets for future benefit. In a tribal group existence we have in effect socialism or the sharing of assets in the interests of benefitting the group.

This is not a crusade to try and prove something to be true which isn't. I am questioning current evolutionary understanding and saying that there are grounds for considering that the human characteristics observed in autism can explain our evolutionary story. I do not believe we are the same as other primates. I think we have been pushed close to the point of extinction and it is through this evolutionary experience the homo sapien has become the unusual creature that he is in the animal world.

Dylan wrote:
"This is not a crusade to try and prove something to be true which isn't. I am questioning current evolutionary understanding and saying that there are grounds for considering that the human characteristics observed in autism can explain our evolutionary story."

By all means do so. But do so within the construct that has provided all of the progress our species has made in the last several hundred years: The scientific method.

Penicillin was not discovered by someone who created a molecule and then tried to force humans to find it non-toxic and bacteria to find it lethal.

DA Morgan has said about my approach to our evolutionary story "By all means do so but within the construct that has provided all of the progress our species has made in the last several hundred years : The scientific method"

He is right about most progress in the last few hundred years being by established scientific method. There are in my view limitations however to remaining in a box. Had we done so in the past we wouldn't have science but religion. Charles Darwin wasn't particularly popular when he questioned God's creation of the world. The box then was religion and still there are people that hold a different view to his.

I have just realised what is meant by the horse and zebra scenario. I would agree if the simplest works don't look for anything else. For me however the horse doesn't work and the zebra does. With the zebra we have evolutionary cause for different political perspectives. We have Republican for the single family values and democrat for the tribal values. If we had a horse we would just have democrat.

We have evolutionary cause for poverty in Africa and wealth in the capitalist West. Capitalist single family descendants have migrated to the locations that form Britain, USA, Australia and Japan to name a few. We have few of these naturally capitalist people left in the centre of origin that being East Africa and consequently we have poverty there.

With the Zebra we have evolutionary cause for civilisation itself. Single family descendants were pressed out through competition with the tribes to periphery locations. In these places they created artificial rules of cooperative behaviour and so created civilisation. When we think of the location of the classical civilisations they are not in prime central areas but rather poor peripery places that were not sought after by the tribes.

With the zebra model for human evolution we can track backwards and forwards providing logical explanation to our evolutionary story. As for that story being provable I think that we need to bear in mind that even Darwin's notion of natural selection hasn't been proved to everybody yet.

Dylan Brown wrote:
"... even Darwin's notion of natural selection hasn't been proved to everybody yet."

And it no surprise that Darwin didn't get it perfectly correct any more than Isaac Newton got it perfectly correct.

But that does not mean that evolution doesn't work and that Darwin's work was a key component to our understanding it. Mendel wasn't write about much of what he said but he too pointed in the correct direction. Pointing at Darwin plays into the hands of those who are the enemies of reality.

Sorry if I didn't express myself clearly. What I meant to point out was that our common usage of certain words, like obsession, is a lot looser than scientific definitions. My "obsession" with growing flowers is really an enjoyable hobby for me. I'm good at it, and the sight of the flowers give myself and other onlookers some enjoyment. If I don't get to tend them as often as I'd like, that's OK with me. If I had to move to a city and had no place to grow things, I'd accept it. But if I have a home with a little land around it, it will be blooming.

My neighbor, on the other hand, is compelled to do things. The last two days he was out in the rain, detailing his car, even though you cannot possibly do the job correctly in the rain. My flowers will fend for themselves until I have a nice weekend with suitable weather. My neighbor is truly obsessed, I just like pretty flowers.


Taking DA Morgan's hypothesis that we have always lived as tribal colonies I think gets us at the crux of the matter. All the work I have seen hypothesising human evolution has this assumption at its centre.

But there's good reason for making this assumption -- namely that our closest cousins in the animal kingdom are also gregarious.


This is where autistic tendencies come into my alternative scenario. Here we have anti social people. The common view would be that they have a disorder and that makes them behave the way they do.
When however we look at Asperger's Syndrome for instance we do not have a scientifically observable cause. With Downs syndrome on the other hand we do have a observable difference in chromosone pattern from the norm. There is a scientifically observable cause for this syndrome. Why is that?

Because Downs is an easy one! A whole extra chromosome is involved. In my reading on AS, it says that the syndrome is apparently passed down from generation to generation, indicating a genetic cause. That the cause is not as obvious as Downs makes it harder to nail down.

If my scenario is correct then the we would perhaps have to be looking for a million slight variations in genetic coding to identify the difference for autism. We would then have to link those variations together and explain how they all went wrong at the same time. I do not believe this is likely to be possible.

Start with simple before jumping to the conclusion that millions of genes, acting in unison, cause AS. If AS repeatedly shows up in particular families over the generations, the genetic cause might be a lot simpler than that.

There are other human characteristics that do not support the view that we are all descended from a tribal group. We have the concept of monogamy which is quite rare in the animal kingdom. My evolutionary cause for monogamy is that both parents are needed to be bonded together for the duration of child rearing. I do not see evolutionary cause for this in a tribal group where food is shared between the group.

Few species are monogamous, but many are gregarious. Monogamy may not be the proper measure of whether a creature prefers social groups or not.


This is not a crusade to try and prove something to be true which isn't. I am questioning current evolutionary understanding and saying that there are grounds for considering that the human characteristics observed in autism can explain our evolutionary story. I do not believe we are the same as other primates. I think we have been pushed close to the point of extinction and it is through this evolutionary experience the homo sapien has become the unusual creature that he is in the animal world.

No, we're not the same. But it appears more plausible to me, at this time, that the slight autism that is AS could be a benefit to a community of social humans if only a few people had it, as opposed to the entire group having it. I would think our ancestors would be more successful as generalists (members of the society being somewhat adept at many things). A specialist (say a highly skilled and perhaps "obsessed" tool-maker) would be a value to the group, but less likely to thrive for many generations as a loner.

Soilguy wrote:
"My "obsession" with growing flowers is really an enjoyable hobby for me."

Your obsession is not.

obsession n. Compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.

I doubt your gardening involves symptoms of anxiety except when you find a slug or mole.

Perhaps you should choose a different way to say it. How about:

"I received great pleasure from the experience of growing flowers?"

I'm afraid I opened the door to a tangent with that example!

Slugs, though, can be a wonderful learning experience for kids. The Siren Song of a dish of beer got one of my girls hooked on scientific inquiry. She eventually discovered that I can kill slugs with a pan of yeast in water, and that I should save the beer for the purpose god had intended for it.

And no doubt you discovered that garlic in vodka kills aphids ... but that you've better uses for them too.