Adult Aspergers - does it have evolutionary advantages?

Discussion in 'Free Thoughts' started by ToR original, Jul 13, 2018.

?

Is ASD a postive evolutionary advantage

  1. YES

    2 vote(s)
    50.0%
  2. NO

    2 vote(s)
    50.0%
  1. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,632
    Well, that's my point - no, we don't. We overpopulate until the ecosystem crashes and almost all the organisms die. In some places _other_ organisms evolve to take advantage of this self-destructive behavior (i.e. the fox-rabbit cycle.) But in places where there's no such regulatory mechanism, the organism overpopulates until the ecosystem is destroyed and almost all of those organisms die - thus demonstrating the lack of a "don't overpopulate" gene. (Rabbits in Australia are a good example here.)

    To put it another way, genes are selfish. They don't care about the survival of the species - they care about the survival of _themselves._
     
    Dr_Toad likes this.
  2. Guest Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. ToR original Registered Member

    Messages:
    71
    Genes do have an 'overpopulation' mechanism, it's called ageing.

    https://genetics.thetech.org/original_news/news93

    "Scientists don't know for sure why we get old. But some researchers from Stanford have provided evidence that some animals may be programmed to die at a certain time. In this case, they studied the lowly worm C. elegans. The researchers compared which genes were on and to what extent between young and old worms. What they found was that the genes affected by aging were all controlled by at least three other genes. And that these genes change as we get older and aren't affected by wear and tear. What this suggests is that worms die when they do because it is programmed into their DNA. Interesting, but what does that have to do with people? It might be an important part of why humans age too. Scientists still don't know why humans age. But they have at least two theories."

    And re selfish gene theory
    https://www.researchgate.net/post/Are_Richard_Dawkins_selfish_genes_pseudoscience
     
    Last edited: Jul 15, 2018
  4. Guest Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    ad hominem thread jack attempt
    aspergers is not a swap out for "truth" propoganda media leverageing.
     
  6. Guest Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    additionally, when speaking of a generic positive, if that positive results in the species being wiped out or changed in a way that is then defined as negative, then you polarise the nature of the original position to suggest it is a binary atribute.
    Human nature is Revisionist
    it is also fluid

    i.e
    if you removed all war from the human species, how many billion people would never have been born ?
    e.g 50% of pregnancys are un-intended(how does this concept equate to human nature in a ongoing manner of psychological formative consciousness ?)
     
  8. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,914

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Actually, I'm sure you don't know what it means.
     
    Dr_Toad likes this.
  9. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
    truthful
    inferred

    https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Threadjack
    you were saying ?
     
  10. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,842
  11. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    i like your Cantor.
    its very persuasive
    quite see through.

    but by all means, come back to the thread topic when ever you feel like it instead of attempting to manipulate the emotive subjectivity back on to the thread author.
     
  12. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,842
    You addressed a post to me that makes no sense. What kind of a comment do you expect from me?
     
  13. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    obviousely its all my fault.
    i attacked you
    obviousely
    its all about ... who ? or what ?
    what happened to the thread topic ?

    "but i wasnt even talking to you"

    yawn ! narcisisstic defense routine...

    i am just being nice and pointing out that if you want people to take you seriousely you should learn how to post on topic and not attempt to subtley change the thread subject by inferring personal slights.
    sound familiar ?
     
  14. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,632
    Well, no.

    Ageing has a lot of causes. One primary cause is telomere erosion; this allows a certain number of duplications before the chromosomes get so short that they can't reliably duplicate any more. There are ways to prevent this. But if you prevent this, then you often get cancer. Telomere erosion has a huge benefit - if one cell gets an oncogene activated and starts reproducing out of control, it only gets through a certain number of replications before it hits the erosion limit and dies. This is called the Hayflick Limit. This is relevant here because it both affects our genome and is controlled by our genome.

    Now, occasionally a cell gets all the right oncogenes turned on to start uncontrolled replication AND gets a mutation that effectively turns off the Hayflick limit. That cell will now live forever, given good conditions. This, of course, is deadly, and will kill you rapidly from the resulting tumors.

    It is worth noting that there is an "immortal cell line" that came from the tumor of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Not only did these tumor cells not experience telomere erosion (true of most virulent cancers) it also could reproduce well outside the body, as long as they were provided with oxygen and glucose. These cells are now used for all kinds of medical testing, because they are 100% human cells that just divide a lot, and do so forever.

    So evolution is constantly in a battle to keep an organism alive and fertile for as long as possible. If evolution comes up with a solution that allows longer cell lives, then cancer becomes more deadly and kills the organism before it can reproduce. If evolution comes up with a solution that shuts down cell division earlier, then you get early death, and the organism can't reproduce as much. There is no "one right answer" to this problem, which is why organism lifespans vary so much.

    So no, aging is not a "feature" of our genome that does something useful, like prevents overpopulation. It is evolution's answer to cancer.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    21,632
    That line doesn't even make any sense.
     
    Seattle likes this.
  16. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,057
    You sound like Trump, except that he doesn't use any words that long.
     
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    I still think being social is a distinct advantage to a society. I don't think a society of majority aspies would thrive.
     
  18. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,842
    pre-subjective emotive hyperbolism

    yawn! super ego existentialism in a Maslow hierarchy framework

    in essence an incorporeal hereditament.
     
  19. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,914
    Yeah. That's the correct definition.
    "...attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument..."

    And now that you know what it means, you can see that it does not apply to a comment (post 2) in which there was no attack upon you, the person.
     
  20. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,914
    Indeed. Rainbow is having us on.

    When he started posting regularly a couple of months back, he was relatively coherent. Proper sentence structure, clarity in train-of-thought, etc.

    This disjointed prose - that's meant to sound like someone spinning the dial up and down the radio stations - kicked-in rather suddenly a few weeks back - when he started posting techno-babble in a particular thread. (If I were of-a-mind, I think I could locate the thread and maybe even the post.)

    Anyway, obviously he liked it; he has been posting like this ever since.

    It's an adopted persona - a schtick.
     
    Seattle likes this.
  21. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,447
    your still thread jacking by making personal critiqueing comments.

    you cant post on topic.

    "attack" is obviousely a trigger word for you which blinds you to the over all meaning of the term.
    thats ok. everyone has their own different issues. i am not above being critiqued and i dont claim not to have issues...

    i am not quite sure why you are playing soft emotional back up to the basic thread jacking though.
    LoL
    you could prove it wrong any time you liked by simply posting on subject.
    but the moment you do, you lose your power position of suggesting the thread author is somehow wrong for posting the subject & asking the question.
    annunciating the process like a comentator half a minute behind is old school bully mental programming.
    if you want people to take you seriousely ... and around you go again.
    good luck with that.

    your hyper criticalism is not on subject of the thread.
    you direct it at the poster rather than the subject.

    you do so by being first to effectively try & kill the thread topic.

    poor show !
     
  22. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,875
    Noting this thread was filed in Free Thoughts, I would take the moment to point out that the record so far makes some manner of point all its own.
     
    RainbowSingularity likes this.
  23. ToR original Registered Member

    Messages:
    71
    Or is Cancer evolutions answer to overpopulation and so on and so forth, meanwhile 'evolution' is a theory not a 'thing' and so 'it' doesn't 'do' anything at all.
     

Share This Page