Adult Aspergers - does it have evolutionary advantages?

Is ASD a postive evolutionary advantage

  • YES

    Votes: 2 50.0%

  • NO

    Votes: 2 50.0%
  • Total voters
    4
ToR original said:
And so we have an evolutionary advantage regarding 'not overpopulating' because is there is no organism there is no species.
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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._
 
billvon said:
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._
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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
 
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DaveC426913 said:
Couple of questions here:

Are you asking if it will have an evolutionary advantage in the future?

Or are you asking if perhaps its apparent recent rise is due to some evolutionary pressure?

Because there are lots of things that can cause a rise in atypical brain structure and/or development that have nothing to do with evolution.

You can't examine the modern human population without considering its unique qualities for ignoring natural selection.
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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 ?)
 
RainbowSingularity said:
ad hominem
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i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means.jpg


Actually, I'm sure you don't know what it means.
 
DaveC426913 said:
i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means.jpg


Actually, I'm sure you don't know what it means.
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Seattle said:
What positive evolutionary advantage do you perceive? Asperger's isn't about "telling it like it is".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
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What positive evolutionary advantage do you perceive?
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"telling it like it is"
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truthful
inferred

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Threadjack
To take over the content of a message thread by changing the subject of discourse to a topic outside the purview of the original subject and/orforum, while maintaining the subject line. A form of amusement for trolls. Threadjacking is distinguished from flaming, as flames are a quasi-personal attack on a poster or on a poster's style of discourse, where threadjacking is deliberatly steering the discussion offtopic.
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you were saying ?
 
Seattle said:
I don't think you are equipped to respond to these posts. Your entire post is nonsensical. Ad hominem and threadjack have nothing to do with my comment. They are your words and now you are defining them. English is not the language for you apparently.
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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.
 
RainbowSingularity said:
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.
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You addressed a post to me that makes no sense. What kind of a comment do you expect from me?
 
Seattle said:
You addressed a post to me that makes no sense. What kind of a comment do you expect from me?
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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 ?
 
ToR original said:
Genes do have an 'overpopulation' mechanism, it's called ageing.
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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.
 
ToR original said:
How about if the 'majority' were Aspies ... would that 'society' thrive more so than the existing? Or is being highly 'social' still the defining factor for success - bearing in mind we now (in the developed world) seem to be less social than ever (people on phones in restaurants, chatting on Internet, staying home).
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I still think being social is a distinct advantage to a society. I don't think a society of majority aspies would thrive.
 
RainbowSingularity said:
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 ?
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pre-subjective emotive hyperbolism

yawn! super ego existentialism in a Maslow hierarchy framework

in essence an incorporeal hereditament.
 
billvon said:
That line doesn't even make any sense.
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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.
 
DaveC426913 said:
attack
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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.
Seattle said:
pre-subjective emotive hyperbolism

yawn! super ego existentialism in a Maslow hierarchy framework

in essence an incorporeal hereditament.
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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 !
 
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.
 
billvon said:
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.
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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.
 
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