CapitalistImperialistPig

If you happen to be science, the arts, politics, philosophy... Via Marginal Revolution , a new paper looks at the relationship between family psychopathology and intellectual specialization. It turns out that this idea is not exactly new: A link between intellect and temperament has long been the subject of speculation. Aristotle claimed that “those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia”, while the physician Benjamin Rush noted a link between manic episodes and “talents for eloquence, poetry, music, and painting” ... Studies of the artistically inclined report linkage with familial depression ..., while among eminent and creative scientists, a lower incidence of affective disorders is found ... In the case of developmental disorders, a heightened prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been found in the families of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers ... These threads of evidence suggest that ...

Tyler Cowen writes on Autism, economics, and the new DSM definition . One interesting sentence: It’s well known that the DSM process itself is, for better or worse, heavily influenced by various interest groups, including pharmaceutical lobbies. the first two comments form a priceless couplet.

A very interesting CBS Sixty Minutes program today told the story of Jake , a kid who started showing autistic symptoms at age two and began regressing in his development. His parents tried everything, and finally found that one thing he loved was numbers. His development of his love of numbers and math coincided with a return of some social skills and language. By age eight, he was a math prodigy, auditing university math classes and getting the highest scores on math tests. Now thirteen, he is a college sophomore and intends to study for a doctorate in physics. He was the youngest person to have published in Phys Rev A By now, he has an excellent vocabulary, speaks like a very self-possessed adult, and interacts easily and naturally with his fellow college students. Allegedly he has maxed every IQ test he has taken. One special talent he possesses is a superb, probably eiditic memory for things he is interested in. He claims to never forget any math or physics problem he has ...

The LA times is running series called Discovering Autism . The title is derived from the idea that Autism, long thought to be a rare disorder, is actually quite common, afflicting about 1 per cent of us. Autism diagnosis in childhood has exploded, and is now twenty times more common that a few decades back. Increasingly overwhelming evidence indicates that that difference is due mostly or entirely to earlier generations failure to spot the illness or correctly identify it. In particular, large scale population studies show that autism is roughly as common in 80 year olds as in children. Nearly all these people went through life with no diagnosis or or an incorrect one. Some were institutionalized as psychotic, but others managed to lead somewhat normal lives. As I've mentioned before here, usually to great derision, there is even evidence that many classed as geniuses were also autistic. Artists, musicians, physicists, chess masters, and mathematicians are frequently cited. ...

Simon Baron-Cohen, who has often been featured on these pages as an expert on autism, has a new book out, reviewed here in the New York Times.   In the US, it's title is The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty .   From Katherine Bouton's review, cited above: “My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, which might be seen as expanding on the views on empathy expressed in his 1997 book, “Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind” (Bradford). Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”). Dr. Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge and director of the university’s Autism R...

If there is anything evolution ought to be good at, it’s eliminating harmful genes. There at least a few genes in our pool, though, which are surprisingly common despite being very harmful. The classic example is sickle cell anemia. At least before modern medicine, if you got two copies of the sickle cell gene, you were very likely to die early from sickle cell anemia. Having one copy, however, tended to make the symptoms of malaria milder and make surviving it more likely. This double edged quality helped this otherwise purely harmful gene survive and prosper. You might ask your intelligent designer friends to explain that, though no doubt they have some BS answer. I want to consider the surprising results of a recent South Korean study in the light of the above. In the first study to take a broad-population look at the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders — types of autism ranging from severe symptoms to the milder Asperger's syndrome — researchers found a rate of ...