Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Scientific Revolutions, Abductive Reasoning, and Autism

1. Introduction

Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962) is an interesting example of a self-referencing idea. In the work, Kuhn outlines a description of how scientific frameworks tend to transform over time through a roughly cyclical pattern of paradigm, anomaly, crisis, and then paradigm shift—in essence, through a series of stasis-breaking challenges and radical reformulations. This description runs counter to the then prevailing view that science progresses in a more incremental and accretive fashion, using the tools of verifiability and falsifiability to nudge the scientific community towards consensus in the face of new and/or competing theories. Kuhn's work has received its share of criticism over the years (Masterman, 1970; Sanbonmatsu & Sanbonmatsu, 2017), but there is no questioning that the book has had a profound influence on the history and philosophy of science, its themes now deeply ingrained into the mindsets of both practicing scientists and the general public as they survey how human knowledge has unfolded during the past and continues to develop through the present day (Kaiser, 2012). Which is to say, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has itself produced a meaningful and persistent paradigm shift.

Kuhn's template for scientific revolution is similar in many respects to the concept known as abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning was brought into prominence by the nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who explored the topic frequently throughout his copious writings on logic, scientific classification, semiotics and pragmatism (Peirce, 1992, 1998). Peirce himself sometimes struggled to nail down the exact nature of abductive reasoning, admitting at one point that he had perhaps confused some of its characteristics with those of inductive reasoning during the earlier stages of his career. But Peirce was also the one who crafted, in typical Peircean fashion, the incisive and pithy formula by which abductive reasoning is still commonly articulated today:

The surprising fact, C, is observed.
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Abductive reasoning can be applied against a broad range of circumstances, from personal events to scientific revolutions, but it was for the latter type of application that Peirce stressed the immense importance of abductive reasoning, noting it was the only form of logic by which humans discover and develop anything new.

A distinctive and somewhat enigmatic feature of both scientific revolutions and abductive reasoning is the aha moment, that sudden perception of an effective solution to what had been previously a vexing problem. Kuhn and Peirce say only a little about this epiphanous event, with Kuhn likening it to a change in Gestalt—such as the drawing that transitions suddenly from duck to rabbit—and with Peirce describing the insight as coming to us "like a flash" and as "putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together." Implicit in these brief portrayals is a corollary also evident from the history of scientific revolutions, namely that these aha moments are exclusively the product of individuals, and never of groups.

This essay will explore the role autism plays in both scientific revolution and abductive reasoning, including the spawning of these aha moments. Autism is usually regarded as a medical condition (Hodges et al., 2020), but here an alternative approach will be given extensive consideration, with an emphasis on how the biological, behavioral and sensory characteristics of autism naturally give rise to an atypical form of human perception. It will be demonstrated that it is this atypical form of perception that catalyzes the abductive reasoning underlying knowledge innovation, and as partial evidence for these assertions, it will be discussed how surprisingly often autistic characteristics have made a prominent appearance in the history of scientific revolutions.

Finally, the paradigm under which the scientific community currently operates will be examined with a critical eye. Kuhn's 1962 work can be seen as being highly influenced by the circumstances of the scientific community of that time, and because of this influence, Kuhn misapprehends the state of science as it existed before the beginning of the twentieth century, and also fails to anticipate the predicament into which science would fall by the end of the twentieth century. As scientific work has become more popular, more collaborative and more financially rewarding—and less frequently the domain of unusual and isolated individuals—the scientific community has found itself becoming increasingly stuck inside the regimen Kuhn labels as normal science. In the present day, normal science is producing a particularly deleterious effect, it is systematically suppressing the revolutionary impact of atypical autistic perception.


2. Scientific Revolutions

Kuhn is best known for his introduction of the concept of paradigm shift, but paradigm shift is only one aspect—and often too narrowly understood—of Kuhn's more encompassing description of a cycle of stasis and upheaval underlying historical scientific change. The word paradigm for Kuhn is a convenient label for the circumstances of a mostly stable and generally agreed-upon scientific practice, as embodied by the scientific community in the form of textbooks, journals, conferences, constructive collaboration, and so on. During this period of what Kuhn calls normal science, the scientific community's efforts are directed almost entirely towards the confirmation and shoring up of the sanctioned framework, with little to no endeavor directed towards overthrow. What eventually disturbs a paradigm is the accumulation and/or significance of anomalies, problems that stubbornly defy all effort to be resolved within the context of prevailing theories. These anomalies foment a state of crisis within the community, with the crisis prone to being answered by the introduction of an entirely new framework, one often incommensurable with the old way of seeing things. If this new framework proves to be effective at both resolving the anomalies and clearing the landscape for future progress, the scientific community will gradually abandon the old framework and adopt the new, establishing the next paradigm for ongoing scientific practice. Thus, paradigm shift can be seen as having two different but related meanings. One, paradigm shift can refer to the adoption of the new paradigm over the old one, a process that is often slow moving and happens under the reluctant sway of the scientific community. And two, paradigm shift can refer to the insightful perception of a new and effective framework, an event that can occur suddenly and remains the province of just one individual.

Perhaps the quintessential example of these concepts is Einstein's introduction of special relativity (Einstein, 1905). The prevailing paradigm leading up to that occasion was still mostly that of Newtonian mechanics, buttressed by additional features to accommodate Maxwell's already anomalous field theory of electromagnetic waves. One of these additional features was the luminiferous ether, the hypothesized medium through which light, electricity and magnetism could propagate, but efforts to detect motion through this ether, including the famous Michelson-Morley experiment (Michelson & Morley, 1887), had instead produced an incongruous result, namely that the speed of light remained the same in every direction measured, no matter the velocity of the source. Several attempts were made—for instance, by Lorentz and Poincaré (Lorentz, 1904; Poincaré, 1900)—to reconcile this outcome to the prevailing framework, but because these efforts still clung to the existing paradigm, they failed to provide the necessary clarification. That task fell to the young Einstein, still a patent office clerk, who after several years of grappling with the problem, found sudden inspiration in the early summer of 1905 and completed his famous paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies in a mere matter of weeks. That paper did not cling to the existing paradigm but instead boldly defied it, proclaiming the ether to be superfluous and postulating an entirely new conception of space, time, matter and energy.

As is often the case, Einstein's revolutionary ideas, despite resolving the anomalies concisely and clearing the ground for future progress, did not meet with immediate acceptance from the scientific community; nearly two decades would pass before relativity became firmly established as the basis for the next paradigm (Goldberg, 1970). Many of Kuhn's other examples of scientific revolution follow a similar course: Copernicus's heliocentric model of cosmology, Newton's laws of motion and gravity, Dalton's atomic theory of chemistry, Darwin's description of natural selection—all these innovations were the inspiration of an individual, and all were met with initial resistance by the larger group (Barber, 1961). There exists an inherent tension in each case of scientific revolution, the tension between the scientific community's intrinsic adherence to the familiar way of seeing things versus an individual's disruptive introduction of an atypical counter perception (Kuhn, 1978).

Kuhn applies his ideas almost exclusively to the domain of the natural sciences, but in a broader sense, science is simply a term for the pursuit of greater understanding, and thus Kuhn's scheme can just as effectively be applied to knowledge acquisition in general. The first control of fire, the first use of abstract language, the first mathematical concept—these moments are lost to prehistory, but there is no reason to expect they were not the inspiration of uncommon individuals, and were met with initial resistance by the guardians of the then current conventional wisdom. This pattern of human knowledge advancement, accretive in its totality but reconstructive at its core, is in many respects the primary distinguishing feature of the modern form of the human species (Griswold, 2023a). Ever since the turn towards behavioral modernity, humans have been increasingly distancing themselves from their purely animal past by reassessing and reconstructing their surrounding environment, and this activity has not been accomplished in a sociable, gradual and piecemeal fashion, but instead has been accomplished via dissension and upheaval, via the constant tearing down of the old paradigm and the rebuilding of the new. The great scientific discoveries of the last several centuries are simply recent examples of what has actually been a long-running human process, a process that, not coincidentally, is both unprecedented within the biological kingdom and is also powered by the fuel of atypical perception.


3. Abductive Reasoning

Over the past decade or so, abductive reasoning has experienced a surge in scholarly interest, so much so that the topic has become something of an academic cottage industry: classifications of abductive patterns (Park, 2015; Schurz, 2008), competing analyses of underlying logical schemas (Lycke, 2012; Urbański, 2022), endless battles over whether inference to the best explanation is the same thing as abduction (Campos, 2011; Mcauliffe, 2015), etc. To sidestep some of this noise, the focus here will remain on Peirce's original three-line formula, with an italicized emphasis on those phrases that appear to be the most under-appreciated within the academic community:

The surprising fact, C, is observed.
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

The observed fact needs to be surprising because abduction begins when something appears to be amiss or inadequate with the contextual framework. New facts, or facts that can be easily assimilated to what is already well understood, do not stimulate the kind of perturbation that comes with abduction—a surprising fact is provocative, a soon-to-be-explained fact is not. Furthermore, the real sting in Peirce's formula is in the transformation C undergoes from being a surprising fact to being a matter of course. That is no small leap. If C is originally a surprising fact—indicating trouble with the contextual framework—then almost by necessity the fact transitions to being a matter of course only via a radical change to the contextual framework, a change sometimes so sweeping as to render the new framework incommensurable with the old. Contextual frameworks can run the gamut from personal worldviews to the shared paradigms of the natural sciences, but in each instance the framework's purpose is to provide clarification and orientation, and when it fails to do so, it needs to be discarded and rebuilt anew. Thus, the A of Peirce's formula is often much more than just an explanatory hypothesis, the A of Peirce's formula is what people now commonly call a paradigm shift.

Let us consider some examples. The first example is the already mentioned introduction of special relativity. Just about any instance of scientific revolution could serve as illustration for abductive reasoning—special relativity happens to be particularly thematic. There were two major anomalies, or surprising facts, that provoked Einstein's scrutiny. One, there was the unexpectedness of the Michelson-Morley result, doggedly indicating no detectable motion through the luminiferous ether. And two, no one, including Einstein himself, seemed to be able to adjust Maxwell's electromagnetic equations to make them conform to the Galilean relativity principle (Earman et al., 1982). Einstein's solution to these challenges, simple in conception but monumental in its consequence, did indeed transform both of these anomalies into a matter of course. The first anomaly was resolved by raising the constancy of the speed of light in every inertial frame to the level of postulate, rendering the Michelson-Morley outcome straightforward and trivial. This also cleared up the second anomaly, by allowing Einstein to demonstrate that his inability to make Maxwell's equations conform to the relativity principle was ironically correct, because in fact no adjustment was needed, the equations already conformed as they were.

Here, the A of Peirce's formula was nothing short of the overthrow of the contextual framework of physics, a complete reconceptualization of space, time, matter and energy. What was gained by this disruption was clarification, a clearing of what had been previously a problematic landscape, a reorientation allowing scientists to proceed. Compare this outcome to the approach taken by Hendrik Lorentz. Lorentz, prior to Einstein, had already developed much of the mathematics describing relativity, but had done so through a strained effort to accommodate the perceived anomalies to the prevailing Newtonian/Maxwellian framework, and the strain shows. Time dilation for Lorentz was in essence a mathematical trick, a kludge to force the equations to conform to the relativity principle. And length contraction was a mysterious property imposed upon moving bodies by the luminiferous ether, calibrated precisely to the Michelson-Morley result. These interpretations, even if they were true, would not provide clarification, but would instead simply shift the venue of the anomalies. A mathematical trick that seems to work with time is itself anomalous; compression of moving bodies by a massless ether is itself a surprising fact. Abduction—especially ampliative abduction, the kind that produces new understanding—is less about the search for plausible hypotheses than it is about the quest for clarification. Both Einstein and Lorentz had offered plausible hypotheses, but Einstein's paradigm shift produced clarification, Lorentz's strained fit to the old paradigm did not.

To take a more everyday example, consider the following scenario. A man wakes up on Friday morning, showers, dresses for work, has breakfast, then walks to the bus stop and waits for the 8:30 bus. But the bus does not arrive. The man is perplexed—this has never happened before, and he begins to get a vague sense that something is wrong. Maybe the bus has broken down, he thinks, and he will need to find an alternative means to get to work, but nothing about that explanation, even if it were true, seems satisfying to him. Then suddenly it hits him—today is not Friday, today is Saturday! Of course the bus has not arrived! The man also now recognizes the source of his vague sense that something was wrong—no one else is at the bus stop and there is less traffic on the road. Everything has become clear to him now and he walks home to begin his Saturday chores.

The surprising fact in this scenario is that the bus does not arrive, and as is often the case, many explanations can be offered to account for this surprising fact. But explanations are not the goal here, clarification is the goal. The hypothesis that the bus has broken down is perfectly reasonable, probably even the most likely, but it does not do anything to clarify this man's situation, in fact it leaves it more messy than before. Will the bus service send a back up? Should he call for a taxi? Do taxes need to be raised in this city to promote better vehicle maintenance, etc.? Of course, reality is often like that, the facts do turn out to be messy sometimes, and humans must learn to deal with those situations too. But contextual frameworks do not have the luxury of being messy—their sole purpose is to provide clarification and orientation, and when one can successfully make use of them, they are the most advantageous of tools. Thus, when the man suddenly realizes that today is actually Saturday and not Friday—that is, when he swaps out one contextual framework for another—his world transitions immediately from being problematic to being crystal clear. He knows how to proceed because he has been afforded the gift of a useful abduction.

As a final example, let us consider a present day anomaly that appears to be in need of a scientific revolution—the Flynn effect. It was early in the twentieth century when IQ exams were first created and administered, and as that century progressed, it was observed that the raw scores on these exams were significantly increasing over time (Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015; Trahan et al., 2014). James Flynn in the 1980s documented, with large amounts of data, that this phenomenon was essentially universal, and the phenomenon soon thereafter would be dubbed the Flynn effect (Flynn, 1984, 1987). The prevailing paradigm regarding human intelligence is that it is a product of the human brain—that is, somewhere within the cerebral mesh of neurons, synapses and biochemical activity, the mechanisms of intelligence make their biological home (Jung & Haier, 2007). But given this contextual framework for intelligence, the Flynn effect emerges as a surprising fact. Evolutionary principles generally preclude such a rapid and population-wide improvement in a biological capacity—the expected outcome is that the average level of human intelligence would remain stable over time.

There have been countless explanations offered for the Flynn effect. For instance, it has been suggested that such factors as better nutrition (Lynn, 1989), greater access to formal education (Baker et al., 2015), increased exposure to video games and puzzles (Clark et al., 2016), etc.—or various combinations of the above (Jensen, 1998)—have contributed to an overall increase in the efficiency of human brains. In addition, several comprehensive models have been proposed hypothesizing a combined genetic and ecological causality for changing levels of human intelligence, intricate formulations such as the Dickens-Flynn model (Dickens & Flynn, 2001) and Woodley's theory of fast and slow life (Woodley, 2012). These explanations all have two characteristics in common. One, each explanation adheres to the prevailing paradigm of a brain-centric mechanism for human intelligence, casting its solution as impactful upon the effectiveness of the human brain. And two, each explanation, even if it were true, would provide little in the way of clarification. For instance, it would remain entirely unspecified how better nutrition, greater access to formal education, or increased exposure to video games and puzzles would induce the type of intense biological and neurological impact required to boost intelligence scores universally. And formulations such as the Dickens-Flynn model and Woodley's theory of fast and slow life are themselves more labyrinthine and more undetermined than the anomaly they are meant to explain (contrast these formulations, for instance, to Einstein's two-postulate model of relativity).

The odd thing is, the current situation regarding the Flynn effect would seem to provide the ideal backdrop for a Kuhnian crisis, and yet the intelligence research community shows no indication of being flummoxed at all. Its relentless adherence to the existing paradigm and its continuing pursuit of non-clarifying hypotheses suggest this community will remain in its current state for quite some time, and this raises a further question of whether something about Kuhn's description of scientific revolution has itself become anomalous in the twenty-first century (more on this topic later). Nonetheless, whether the scientific community is aware of this crisis or not, abductive reasoning would indicate that the most promising path forward with regard to the Flynn effect would be to transform the contextual framework, to shift the prevailing paradigm, to reconceptualize human intelligence (Griswold, 2023b).

The first two examples—special relativity and the non-arriving bus—each contain an aha moment: in his later years, Einstein narrated a description of how a casual conversation on a beautiful Bern day gave him a sudden insight into the nature of his relativity problem, opening the pathway to his famous paper (Stachel, 2002), and of course in the example of the non-arriving bus, the aha moment comes with the sudden realization that the day is Saturday. These aha moments, even when connected to widely shared paradigms, are almost always personal and solitary in nature—the history of science is chock-full of such epiphanies, but they are the epiphanies of individuals, never the epiphany of an entire group. And indeed, as can be seen in the case of the Flynn effect, the scientific community is actually inclined towards the opposite of the aha moment, is inclined towards a mutual and fixed regard for the prevailing paradigm. Thus, there appear to be two types of perception at work within the human population, each antipodally aligned with respect to abductive reasoning and scientific revolutions. One type of perception is prone to being communal and conservative, inherently friendly towards conventional wisdom and the favored paradigm, and could be fairly labeled as typical perception. The other type of perception is prone to being idiosyncratic and iconoclastic, naturally distrustful of the popular perspective, and could be fairly labeled as atypical perception. Both types of perception play important and reciprocal roles in the maintenance and reconstruction of human knowledge, and there is value to be gained in understanding more fully the distinction between them. To that end, the discussion now turns to the concept known as autism.


4. Autism

Autism was first recognized and described in the mid twentieth century, particularly with the publication in the 1940s of case studies by psychiatrist Leo Kanner (Kanner, 1943) and pediatrician Hans Asperger (Asperger, 1944), studies that highlighted the defining behavioral characteristics of the autistic condition—namely, social difficulties, language peculiarities, and an intense focus on circumscribed interests. In the decades that immediately followed these publications, autism was regarded almost invariably as a dire medical condition, exceedingly rare and leading to outcomes inevitably poor (Evans, 2013). However, the current view regarding autism has changed enormously from those earlier times, with two primary developments triggering the transformation (O'Reilly, 2020). First, the prevalence of autism has turned out to be much greater than was originally assumed, increasing by orders of magnitude from initial estimates of around 1 in 2000 (0.05%) to the current estimates of around 1 in 50 (2.0%) (Ballan & Hyk, 2019). And secondly, along with this recognition of significantly greater numbers of autistic individuals has come the parallel realization that only a small percentage of their outcomes turn out to be anything resembling the word dire. In actuality, autistic outcomes constitute an extremely broad range, with indeed some individuals experiencing serious developmental difficulties and requiring lifetime assistance and care, but with many others leading lives of almost indistinguishable normalcy, and some attaining lives of exceptional achievement (Reis et al., 2022). The word spectrum is now frequently employed to depict the wide variability in both autistic presentation and autistic outcomes, and although the word is apt to be misused at times, spectrum does capture an aspect of how autism is generally regarded today.

Nonetheless, the lingering stigma from the earlier views regarding autism does continue to have some unfortunate consequence, the most troubling being the long-lasting impact upon the autism research community. That community still studies autism primarily as a medical condition, focusing nearly all of its efforts and resources on discovering causes and cures. For many decades now, autism research has been directed towards finding the genetic defect that underlies autism (Reiss et al., 1986; Rylaarsdam & Guemez-Gamboa, 2019), towards describing the neurological aberration that explains autism (Haas et al., 1996; Pan et al., 2021), and towards uncovering the environmental insult that produces autism (Cattane et al., 2020; Kern & Jones, 2006), frequently with the stated goal of eradicating, or at least ameliorating, the features of the condition. But these many decades of research have produced literally nothing in the way of results: there is no known genetic defect underlying autism, there is no known neurological aberration explaining autism, and there is no known environmental insult producing autism (Hodges et al., 2020). When it comes to advancing a medical understanding of autism, the scientific community stands no differently today than it did dozens of years ago, and indeed the verdict remains entirely open as to whether autism should be regarded as a medical condition at all.

This essay will examine an alternative description of autism, one that takes into full account the biological, behavioral and sensory characteristics that define autism, but that also looks beyond the narrow restriction of perceiving autism as just a medical condition. This alternative description of autism begins with an account of non-autism—that is to say, what it means to be biologically typical—with an emphasis on those perceptual characteristics that delineate non-autism. This includes a focus on the biological and evolutionary importance of conspecific perception, the innate tendency to perceive first and foremost the other members of one's own species (Buxton et al., 2020). Autism is then contrastingly described as a significant lack of this conspecific perception, a lack that both produces the observable characteristics of the condition and also leads directly to a compensatory and divergent form of perception. These two types of perception—non-autistic typical perception and autistic atypical perception—are then seen as producing in tandem a revolutionary impact upon the entire human species, including being the source of the typical/atypical perceptual divide that characterizes the essential tension at the core of abductive reasoning and scientific revolutions.

In outline form, this alternative description of autism can be presented as follows (a more thorough account can be found in other writings (Griswold, 2007, 2023a)):

  1. Non-autistic, or biologically typical, humans possess fully those behavioral and perceptual characteristics that have carried forward from humanity's not-so-distant animal past. Until recently in their evolutionary history, humans were still pure animals, with their behaviors and perceptions centered exclusively around survival-and-procreative demand—food, water, danger, sex, etc. (Klein, 2009). Not until the turn towards behavioral modernity, starting around a few hundred thousand years ago, did humans begin to add the other behaviors and perceptions that now distinguish the species from the remainder of the animal kingdom (Klein, 2002). Nonetheless, the influence of those animal-origined behaviors and perceptions still remains strong today. Most members of the current population, despite living in artificially constructed environments and despite having most of their biological needs easily met, continue to give a great deal of attention and effort to those familiar targets—food, water, danger, sex, etc.—and much of current human activity is still guided by a shared interest in these familiar themes.

  2. Among the carryovers from humanity's animal past, conspecific perception plays a central role in determining the social and behavioral characteristics of the population. Conspecific perception is the innate tendency to perceive first and foremost the other members of one's own species, a tendency apparent in essentially all animal species: lions perceive first and foremost other lions, honeybees perceive first and foremost other honeybees, etc. Conspecific perception foregrounds intra-species sensory experience against a less distinct sensory background, and this tendency is evolutionarily crucial for allowing mates to discover mates, parents to focus on their offspring, offspring to follow their parents, members of a pack to track one another, and so on. Conspecific perception is quite strong within the human species, as it would be for any species considered to be highly social, and it has the impact of drawing the human population together, because most humans possess a natural and shared interest in observing other humans and in mimicking what other humans do.

  3. Conspecific perception also plays a critical role in the sensory and developmental progress of human individuals. When a human child enters this world he or she must first achieve a sensory grounding, because otherwise, the sensory impressions a child experiences would remain chaotic and unorganized. As is evident from the rapt, natural and delighted attention most children give to other humans and to human activities, conspecific perception is one of the primary means by which human children attain their sensory grounding. From the manifold of impressions that arises in the sensory field, what emerges most predominantly are human sights, human voices, human smells, human activities, and so on. A human child then uses this human-forward sensory grounding to pursue further developmental progress, including first steps into the leveraging world of human language. Thus, most children today owe their perceptual and developmental start primarily to the species' shared and natural interest in all things human.

  4. Biological perception in general, and conspecific perception in particular, has the persistent impact of locking a species into a behavioral and perceptual stasis. Animal behaviors and perceptions are remarkably stable, both across species and across time. Nearly all wild animal species today live lives that are essentially the same as they were hundreds of thousands of years ago, lives similar to those of the other animal species, lives intensely focused on survival-and-procreative demand—food, water, danger, sex, etc. Even evolutionary change does not alter this pattern—the resultant species will live the same biologically and conspecifically focused life as did the predecessor species. With the turn towards behavioral modernity, the human species has clearly broken out of this rigid pattern, with its members living lives today that are much different than they were in prior times. But it is important to recognize that until quite recently in their evolutionary history, humans were just as locked into the confining consequences of biological and conspecific perception as were all the other animals, raising the question of exactly how it came to be that this lock was broken.

  5. Autism can be characterized as a significant diminution of conspecific perception. In marked contrast to biologically typical individuals, autistic individuals can be seen as displaying a diminished awareness and attention for other human beings. Young autistic children do not engage as readily or willingly with other people as non-autistic children generally do, and autistic children appear to be much less interested in observing or participating in human-related activities (Hedger & Chakrabarti, 2021). These behaviors are frequently characterized as social difficulties, but in a sense that phrase mischaracterizes the trait. The so-called social difficulties of autistic children are not the result of a particular social defect so much as they are the result of a substantial perceptual distancing from the species itself. That is to say, the social difficulties of autistic children are the most clearcut evidence of their significant lack of conspecific perception.

  6. The diminution of conspecific perception in autistic children thwarts their attainment of a sensory grounding by the typical means. The degree to which conspecific perception is diminished in autistic individuals can vary, and this may explain in part the spectrum-like nature of autistic presentation and outcomes, but the diminishment is always significant in the following sense: autistic children, unlike biologically typical children, cannot organize their sensory experience around a natural predominance of human-centric features. Almost every autistic child experiences sensory issues (Hazen et al., 2014), issues that range all the way from hypersensitivity to hyposensitivity to synesthesia, and the motleyness of these sensory symptoms suggests they are not the product of a particular physical cause so much as they are the consequence of a generalized difficulty in organizing sensory experience. From the manifold of impressions that arises in the autistic child's sensory field, human sights, human voices, human smells, etc., they do not emerge predominately from the sensory background. This leaves the autistic child without a sensory grounding, navigating what must seem to be the near equivalent of a sensory chaos, and if these circumstances are not resolved, the child can be expected to encounter nearly insurmountable developmental challenges.

  7. To attain their sensory grounding, most autistic children adopt an alternative form of perception, one that can be characterized as a heightened attention and awareness for the inherent structural features that stand out from the surrounding environment. Although usually delayed compared to their non-autistic peers, most autistic children do overcome their developmental challenges, and this developmental progress indicates that most autistic children do attain a sensory grounding, a result evidenced also by the fact their sensory issues tend to ease over time (Kern et al., 2006). But since an autistic child's overcoming of a potential sensory chaos is not achieved through the predominant influence of conspecific perception, it must be achieved by some other means. Chaos as a term denotes a lack of structure, and chaos is generally dissolved by the emergence of structural features—symmetry, repetition, pattern, number, form. Autistic children provide abundant evidence that they overcome their sensory chaos by focusing not on other people, but instead by focusing on the structural elements to be found in their surrounding environment. Ceiling fans, spinning wheels, light switches, the shapes of letters, sports statistics, dinosaur taxonomy, etc., the structure-suffused interests and activities of autistic individuals form a lengthy list. This is a core and defining characteristic of autism, and is often referenced by the phrase restricted and repetitive behaviors, a phrase that mostly misjudges the critical necessity of those behaviors. Whereas non-autistic children can gain their sensory grounding through an interest in all things human—that is, via conspecific perception—autistic children must gain their sensory grounding through an intense focus on the non-biological structural features that stand out from the surrounding environment. Thus, most autistic children today owe their developmental start primarily to an alternative form of perception.

  8. The significant presence of autistic individuals within the human population modifies the perceptual characteristics of the population as a whole, thereby breaking the stasis imposed by biological and conspecific perception. Through their repeated efforts to mirror and to reconstruct the contextual patterns they perceive, autistic individuals bring to the foreground the structural elements and structural potential to be found in the surrounding environment. Non-autistic individuals, previously blinded to these structural elements by the constrictions of biological and conspecific perception, yet keenly aware of what other humans do, begin to notice these autistically inspired patterns and behaviors, and begin to adopt them for themselves. In this fashion, the entire human species begins to perceive and to interact with the surrounding environment in a manner that goes beyond just biological and evolutionary need, thereby opening the door to behaviors unique within the animal kingdom and unprecedented over the course of biological history.

  9. The human turn towards behavioral modernity, including the revolutionary advancement in human knowledge, has been catalyzed by the ongoing symbiosis between the autistic and non-autistic forms of perception. As humans have gained a growing awareness of the structural potential contained within their surrounding environment, they have increasingly reconstructed that environment in countless and complex ways. These artificial innovations embody the advancements in human understanding and carry forward their structural underpinnings to future generations, leading to the multi-faceted and intricate surroundings in which people live today. Human experience now reflects a thorough blending of its two major sources of influence: one, the social, biological and communal aspect that arises out of humanity's animal past, and two, the artificial, structural and revolutionary aspect that has been introduced via the presence of the autistic population.

This description of autism illuminates the essential tension underlying scientific revolutions, with each pole of that tension corresponding to a particular perceptual type. Biologically typical perception underlies the communal and conservative qualities that define the normal science of stable paradigms, and autistic perception sparks the idiosyncratic and iconoclastic inspirations that drive abductive-style paradigm shifts in scientific revolutions. Both poles of this tension play a critical role in the maintenance and advancement of human understanding, with the non-autistic tendencies of normal science serving to buttress and to promulgate knowledge already gained, and with the autistic tendency towards atypical perception serving to demolish and to reconstruct knowledge in need of transformation.


5. The Atypical Individuals of Scientific Revolutions

It is important to recognize that in the modern world there is really no such thing as a purely non-autistic or purely autistic adult individual. Each person has a natural preference—determined mostly by how that person first achieved a sensory grounding—but as each individual matures, he or she will be exposed to a human environment thoroughly suffused with both biological/social influences and also with artificial/structural influences, and will through this exposure gain increasing familiarity and dexterity with both the non-autistic and autistic perceptual traits. This is why a non-autistic individual can become extremely fluent in all manner of artificial and structural endeavor, and it is also why an autistic individual can achieve closer connection to the human species and become accomplished within the social realm. And in scientific practice, no individual is precluded from either of the counterbalancing roles—each individual is capable of engaging in normal science or in scientific revolution, or in both. The distinction is at the perceptual level and not at the level of the individual.

Nonetheless, it can be expected as a general rule that each individual will gravitate more frequently to his or her natural perceptual stance. For instance, the non-autistic individual is more likely to feel at home in the presence of other people, and the non-autistic scientist is more likely to be drawn to the communal and conservative aspects of normal science. At the same time, the autistic individual is more apt to take solitary comfort in the regularity of structured surroundings, and the autistic scientist is more apt to be drawn to the worldview-altering potential of abductive reasoning. Thus, it can also be expected that over the course of scientific history, the aha moments of scientific revolution will have been generated more frequently by individuals giving evidence of possessing autistic-like traits, and indeed, scientific history gives abundant evidence that this is in fact the case.

Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Cavendish, Dalton, Dirac, the Curies—the personalities that emerge from the biographies of such individuals stand out in several respects, including being remarkably similar to one another and being classifiable by a telltale collection of traits: shy, taciturn, socially awkward, intensely focused, late talking, habitual in routine, echolalic, etc. (James, 2003). Indeed, there is not one social butterfly to be found anywhere upon this list. Autism was not a known concept when these individuals lived, but if they were among the population today, their spectrum-like characteristics would be difficult to ignore. This is not a definitive proof that autism can be directly applied to such individuals or that autism was solely responsible for their innovative feats—retrospective application of autism should always be approached with caution and care. But the consistency in the atypical traits of so many individuals has to be more than mere coincidence, and at any rate, the hypothesis can still be put to a future test. There will be future aha moments, and there will be future knowledge revolutions, and with autism now more recognizable within the population, it will be worth some effort to observe how many of these future cases of knowledge revolution come with autism conspicuously nearby.

Although it has become customary to explain the atypical characteristics of history's scientific icons as the by-product of their prodigious genius, there is in fact no reason not to consider the opposing interpretation, that the cause and effect at work here actually runs in reverse.


6. The Structure of Scientific Stagnation

The normal science depicted in Kuhn's 1962 work reflects a remarkably keen eye for the scientific practice of Kuhn's day. Having originally studied to be a practicing scientist himself, Kuhn manages to capture accurately the many mechanisms helping to form and to maintain the scientific community of the 1950s and 1960s: conferences, textbooks, journals, academic associations, specialty groups, and so on. Unfortunately, Kuhn then seems to apply this milieu to much earlier times, with an intimation that Newton, Darwin, Einstein and others performed their work under similar circumstances. This is an anachronism.

Before the twentieth century, scientific community had a much different meaning than it had for Kuhn, or than it has today. During those earlier times, scientists worked almost exclusively as individuals, and sometimes in great isolation. Textbooks were essentially nonexistent, and journals were used not for publication acclaim but instead as a more efficient means of sharing results and ideas than could be had through the redundancy of multiple correspondences. Scientific associations, such as the Royal Society, were relatively few in number, and by and large they kept their doors open to the public, serving as an opportunity for both enthusiasts and dabblers to come together (Schofield, 1963). Science was not then a lucrative profession, in fact quite the opposite. The biographies from those earlier times are filled with anecdotes about struggling to make ends meet and about entering the profession against the express wishes of family, more in favor of the financial security to be had with something like business or law. To be a scientist back then was to be literally not normal, and thus it would not have been surprising to find science's ranks permeated with a fair number of atypical individuals.

Those circumstances began to change during the nineteenth century, and that change accelerated rapidly at the beginning of the twentieth century. Spurred by the needs of both war and commerce, governments and businesses alike began putting much greater value on scientific work, elevating the profession to both higher status and higher pay (Agar, 2012). This attracted a different kind of scientist, one who would not have been comfortable at all within a neglected isolation, but who was perfectly at home inside a lauded and burgeoning crowd. Scientists now worked less frequently as individuals and began forming into ever enlarging teams. Scientific method transitioned into codified standards of practice. And scientific associations became more insular and more elite. This was the scientific community Kuhn was intimately familiar with, still with a hint of maverickness from its former days of revolutionary glory, but also settling rapidly into the large and regulated practice Kuhn identified as normal science. What Kuhn did not seem to appreciate was that this particular form of normal science was only recent in its origin, and was not applicable to earlier times, and this led also to Kuhn failing to anticipate that this form of normal science would become increasingly entrenched, rigid and homogenous by the end of the twentieth century.

Whereas science prior to the 1900s was receptive to an autistic-like individual, the science of the 2000s has become a hegemony of the biologically typical. Its ranks are now overflowing with the decidedly non-autistic, and almost every aspect of modern science serves to foster the communal and the conservative: affixation to a research team is currently de rigueur, publication has become a mass competition for citations, and success is measured primarily in the size of research grants. In such a system, there is no place for an autistically minded individual to find a productive or comfortable home. Not in the selection of the most well-connected mentor upon entering graduate school. Not in the paying of homage to one's superiors through a stream of obsequious references. Not in the groupthink sessions of one's ever present team. The autistically minded individual, the one who has a natural proclivity for those individualistic aha moments of abductive reasoning, that individual has been systematically elbowed out from the community, or else has been forced to subsume his or her tendencies under a mountain of normative rules. Try to imagine a young patent office clerk with a nonconforming notion about space and about time, try to imagine that individual getting published today, or being noticed by the scientific community at all.

The consequence of this transformation is of course inevitable—the notion of scientific revolution has almost entirely disappeared. It is not apparent that there has been any notable knowledge innovation over the last seventy-five years, and it seems every current form of scientific endeavor is in a state of being perpetually stuck. Consider human intelligence research and its continuing befuddlement over the Flynn effect. Consider autism science and its ongoing obsession with medical cause. Consider that king of the sciences, the domain of physics, and its endless dysfunctional marriage with string theory. Or try this: browse the historical list of Nobel prizes, a list that in the early 1900s was marked with the individual names of Planck, Bohr, Rutherford, de Broglie and Einstein, and in the early 2000s has turned into an annual celebration of research teams and academic press releases.

Fortunately, humanity need not despair over these circumstances. There will still be knowledge revolutions and there will still be constructive advancement in human understanding, even if those revolutions and that advancement must come from someplace else than the scientific community. Or perhaps that community will come to recognize its current state of crisis and will begin the search for a self-correcting paradigm shift. The exact details of such a shift remain uncertain, but its general outcome can be anticipated: a return to something more akin to former productive times, when there was still the essential tension between science's two counterbalancing poles, when there was still a symbiotic relationship between the non-autistic and autistic forms of perception.




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Saturday, February 24, 2024

Prototypical Autism Is Transformatively Atypical

1. Introduction

Laurent Mottron, an autism researcher based in Montreal, Canada, along with various colleagues and co-authors (hereafter referred to as the Mottron team), has of late introduced and promoted a concept called prototypical autism. Although this concept was hinted at in earlier writings, its main presentation has come in the form of two recent papers. The first paper, A radical change in our autism research strategy is needed: Back to prototypes (Mottron, 2021a), addresses the motivation for delineating prototypical autism from other instances of autism diagnosis, a motivation triggered mostly by concerns over the statistical noise produced by too much heterogeneity within autism research cohorts. The second paper, Prototypical autism: New diagnostic criteria and asymmetrical bifurcation model (Mottron & Gagnon, 2023), outlines in some detail the Mottron team's description of how to recognize prototypical autism among the population and how to distinguish such cases from other forms of autism diagnosis.

There is much to appreciate about this initiative. The highlight of the Mottron team's effort is to be found in the team's general description of how prototypical autism presents, especially during the critical age range of around two to five years. The behavioral characteristics outlined in this description are more accurate, more comprehensive and more vivid than can be found in any of the official diagnostic guidelines, painting an informative picture of what autism tends to look like close at hand. To this can be added the Mottron team's twofold awareness of the potential to be found in the unusual characteristics of autistic individuals, first with an emphasis on the fact that autistic children can often make significant gains by leaning into their unusual interests, as opposed to being forced to suppress them, and second, by reconceptualizing autism as a non-defective and viable branch of human development, including an explicit acknowledgement that many autistic children go on to live relatively normal and even exceptional lives after the age of five. Over the years, the Mottron team has been one of the few autism research teams (perhaps the only autism research team) willing to contemplate and to discuss the potential value arising out of autistic atypicality, and that willingness remains on display here.

Nonetheless, there are some shortcomings in the Mottron team's effort, two of which stand out in particular. First, although the Mottron team does recognize the critical importance of perception in distinguishing autistic individuals from their non-autistic counterparts, the team's characterization of these two different forms of perception is confusing at best, with a vague reference to the "social bias" of non-autistic children and an incongruous reference to the "enhanced perceptual functioning" of autistic children. These phrases fail to distinguish clearly the two perceptual types, but more importantly, they fail to explain why there is a perceptual difference between non-autistic and autistic children. This essay will discuss a more specific and more informative approach to making that distinction, employing the concept of conspecific perception—the innate tendency to perceive first and foremost the other members of one's own species—as the primary means both for delineating the non-autistic and autistic perceptual traits, as well as for explaining the contrasting genesis of each perceptual type.

The second shortcoming of the Mottron team's initiative is its complete silence regarding prototypical autism's impact upon the entire human species. The stated motivation for developing the concept of prototypical autism—to improve the statistical power of current autism research—discounts the possibility that there is a much bigger picture to consider here, one of importance to autistic individuals themselves. This essay will discuss humanity's turn towards behavioral modernity, including the perceptual and behavioral transformations that stand at the foundation of that turn, and will demonstrate that these transformations are mirrored precisely in the Mottron team's contrasting description of the non-autistic and autistic perceptual and behavioral traits. That is to say, the atypicality of autistic individuals within the human population explains much about the atypicality of the human species itself, now perceptually and behaviorally removed from the remainder of the animal kingdom, and perceptually and behaviorally removed from humanity's own not-so-distant animal past. If autistic individuals are going to be understood for who they actually are, and if their unusual characteristics are going to be valued for the impact they actually bring, then autistic contribution to human transformative history needs to be recognized. And although the Mottron team has all the information it requires to make that connection, it chooses not to consider the topic at all.

It might be stated in the Mottron team's defense that contemplating the conceptual leap from autistic traits to the transformative characteristics of the human behavioral turn goes beyond the jurisdiction of normal autism science. But the problem with this defense is that it dooms autism science to a self-imposed tunnel vision, a kind of group myopia that has been producing endless decades of null results (Myers et al., 2020; Parellada et al., 2023; Whitehouse et al., 2021). Accordingly, this essay will conclude with some thoughts on the stultifying consequences of modern scientific practice, where focus has shifted entirely towards cultivating professional and collaborative craft—standards and guidelines, grants and funding, credentials and citations, etc.—and has abandoned the type of individualistic and revolutionary effort that used to produce breakthroughs of understanding. Thus, it can be seen that the most significant problem with autism research is not one of statistical noise. The most significant problem with autism research is its perfunctory application of normal autism science.

2. Prototypical Autism

A rough summary of the Mottron team's description of a prototypically autistic child would include the following features:

  1. The autistic child is generally indistinguishable from non-autistic children until sometime during the second year of life. Around the second birthday, the difference from typical development becomes prominent and remains prominent for the next two to three years.

  2. During this period of around two to five years of age, the autistic child will display a significantly low degree of orientation towards social stimuli. This includes a diminished attention to human faces and to human voices, and also includes a noticeable lack of joint-attentive activities and human-mimicking behavior.

  3. During this period, the autistic child will also display a high degree of orientation towards structural and environmental stimuli. This includes a focused attention on such things as patterned movement, geometrical objects, repetitive and/or musical sounds, the shapes of numbers and letters, etc.

  4. During this period, language skills plateau, or even regress, resulting in a limited vocabulary and extremely limited sentence formation. Language peculiarities, such as echolalia and pronoun reversal, are also apparent in many instances.

  5. During this period, certain unusual and telltale behaviors are more common, such as lateral gaze, hand flapping, food selectivity, resistance to change, etc.

  6. After this period, there is usually some degree of developmental catch up, both in social orientation and language ability. This developmental catch up can vary greatly, resulting in outcomes that range all the way from non-verbalness in adulthood and a lifetime need for assistance and care, to promising prospects of advanced education, career, family, etc., with many prototypically autistic individuals experiencing outcomes that fall somewhere on the interval between.

In advocating for its concept of prototypical autism, the Mottron team notes there are a significant number of individuals who will receive an autism diagnosis under the current official diagnostic guidelines but who will tend not to have a presentation that follows the pattern as outlined above. There appear to be three major sub-categories of these individuals who could be described as being non-prototypical:

  1. Individuals with specifiable neuro-genetic conditions. This would include such known instances as fragile X syndrome, Rett syndrome, identifiable de novo mutations, or a medical history giving evidence of neurological trauma. Such individuals will often display similarities to autistic-like behavior, but will also tend to deviate significantly from a course of prototypicality, either in intensity, timing or both.

  2. "Quirky" or behaviorally challenged individuals who possess only a smattering of autistic-like traits. Many children are referred to specialists because of their developmental and/or behavioral challenges, and due to the current latitude in the official autism diagnostic guidelines, such individuals will often receive a diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum. But a large number of these individuals will not follow the prototypical course—that is, they will display a reasonable degree of social orientation, or will have limited structural and environmental engagement, or will give evidence of language skills that are progressing in the usual way. The Mottron team argues that such individuals are better excluded from certain types of autism research (Mottron & Bzdok, 2022).

  3. Asperger-like individuals. This forms a less clearcut case. Until around a decade ago, Asperger Syndrome was an official diagnostic category, intended to delineate children with pronounced autistic-like characteristics but who also possessed notable language skills. This diagnostic distinction proved to be unworkable in practice, and the classification was dropped for the current diagnostic manual (Gamlin, 2017). Nonetheless, there are a significant number of children who appear to fall within this category, and their relationship to the remainder of the autism spectrum remains unclear. The Mottron team suggests these individuals could be formed into a second "prototypical" group (Mottron, 2021b), with characteristics similar to those of the first prototypical group but without the language plateau or regression. However, it could be argued that Asperger-like children are simply choosing linguistic structures as one of their preferred circumscribed interests—that is, instead of an intense focus on something like ceiling fans or calendar calculation, Asperger-like children choose to concentrate on spoken and/or written words. This is evidenced to some degree by the fact that Asperger-like language skills are usually not typical (Saalasti et al., 2008); that is, Asperger-like children do not employ language primarily for social purposes but instead make use of language in idiosyncratic ways (for example, perseveration). If this is an accurate depiction of what is actually taking place, then it would appear these two prototypical groups are far more similar than dissimilar, and the Mottron team's separation of Asperger-like children from the team's main prototypical definition is perhaps just a case of splitting hairs.

What does finally emerge from the Mottron team's lucid description of prototypical autism is a class of individuals remarkably similar to one another and yet identifiably distinct from the biologically typical population. Furthermore, this is a class of individuals who have been giving no evidence of possessing any underlying defect—not genetic, not neurological, not environmentally caused—and this despite the fact the autism research community has been assiduously searching for these defects for dozens of years. The Mottron team highlights this apparent biological benignity of prototypical autism by suggesting the condition would be more effectively understood as a minority but otherwise normal bifurcation of human development, analogous to similar asymmetrical bifurcations, such as left-handedness or twin pregnancy. This opens the door to embracing autistic characteristics for their potential constructive value, including making full use of these characteristics to support developmental progress. Such a viewpoint would stand in stark contrast to the standard approach taken towards autistic traits, where these traits are routinely suppressed instead of being productively employed, suppressed through an assortment of disruptive interventions that would appear to be no more effective than attempting to turn left-handedness into right-handedness (Brignell et al., 2018; Sandbank et al., 2020).

3. Atypical Autistic Perception

In attempting to explain the source of the bifurcation between non-autistic and autistic individuals, the Mottron team highlights the differential targets of interest and attention during information processing, assigning a label of "socially biased processing" for the preferential interests of non-autistic children and a label of "non-socially biased processing" for the preferential interests of autistic children. The Mottron team also tends to reserve use of the words perception and perceptual for the latter type of preferential interest, and this leads in turn to frequent employment of the phrase "enhanced perceptual functioning" to describe autistic cognitive traits. This approach seems confusing in several respects. First, it implies that non-autistic children lack perceptual characteristics, or at the very least are experiencing diminished perceptual functioning. It also suggests that autistic children possess a kind of fortuitous brain capacity that gives them perceptual skills beyond those of ordinary experience (Poulin-Lord et al., 2014), and yet somehow this fortuitous brain capacity proves disruptive to developmental progress. Although the Mottron team's highlighting of information processing and perceptual characteristics is very much on target, the team's odd labeling works to derail the discussion. Under any commonsense use of the words perception and enhanced, it would be difficult to reconcile the phrase "enhanced perceptual functioning" to the developmental pathways of autistic individuals.

For the purpose of this discussion, perception is to be understood as the filtering, foregrounding, and organization of the manifold of impressions arising from the sensory field. Perception creates targets of cognitive attention and provides the potential for a directed and productive reaction to environmental stimulus. Consider the example of three men sitting together in the grandstands at a football game. One man is intently following the plays on the field, scarcely aware of the crowd—he can accurately predict the play that is coming next. The second man is mesmerized by the workings of the scoreboard—he is counting down in his head the seconds until the yardage and downs are updated. The third man is flitting a gaze from person to person—cheerleader, then referee, then that cute snuggling couple three rows down—and he would be unable to tell you the score of the game if his life depended on it. Each individual has access to the exact same sensory stimuli, but each individual perceives something entirely different, foregrounding certain aspects of the sensory experience and backgrounding everything else. This is a commonsense approach to the word perception, and by its means, it should be abundantly clear that both non-autistic and autistic individuals possess perceptual characteristics, with neither of those perceptual types being ultimately enhanced or diminished relative to the other. Given the same sensory environment, non-autistic and autistic individuals simply tend to perceive different classes of things.

The genesis of each perceptual type begins in earnest by the second year of life. When human newborns enter this world, they must soon achieve a sensory grounding, because otherwise the manifold of sensory impressions would remain chaotic and unorganized, thwarting all effort towards productive action and developmental progress. The emerging components of this sensory grounding are what determine the perceptual type. For both non-autistic and autistic individuals, biological demand will bring certain environmental features to the fore—that is, the need for food and water, a fear of danger, and eventually the desire for sex will bring into cognitive attention certain ecologically critical aspects of the surrounding world, providing some of the means by which sensory experience can be differentiated and organized. As the Mottron team notes, prototypically autistic individuals give little to no evidence of having a diminished capacity in these basic biological domains, even when life circumstances cause the expression of these capacities to be manifested in alternative ways.

What does turn out to be the distinguishing characteristic between the non-autistic and autistic types of perception is that non-autistic perception is fundamentally human centric, and autistic perception is not. From out of the manifold of sensory impressions, what tends to foreground naturally and frequently for non-autistic individuals are human faces, human voices, human touch, human smells, human laughter, human activities, etc. Non-autistic children provide abundant evidence of their human-forward attentive awareness, responding with consistent delight to human interaction, joint-attentive sharing, and people-mimicking behavior. Even when their attention is drawn to the non-human aspects of the surrounding environment, it is usually done so through the means of human prompting and human encouragement. Thus, in addition to its basic biological components, non-autistic perception can be characterized by its human-forward content, meaning that non-autistic children tend to organize their sensory experience primarily around the species itself, and around the species' shared and natural interest in all things human.

There is of course nothing unusual about this non-autistic perceptual tendency. The foregrounding of species-specific sensory experience is not just typical within the human population, it is typical across the entire animal kingdom (Lickliter, 1991; Nunes et al., 2020). Lions tend to perceive first and foremost other lions, honeybees tend to perceive first and foremost other honeybees, etc. This widespread tendency can be given the label of conspecific perception, and it can be defined as the innate tendency to perceive first and foremost the other members of one's own species. Conspecific perception's ubiquitous appearance throughout nature can be attributed to its biological and evolutionary necessity. If mates are going to be able to recognize and discover mates, if parents are going to be able to keep track of their offspring, if members of a pack are going to be able to follow one another, then a foregrounded perceptual attention for the other members of one's own species is nothing short of essential. Conspecific perception has evolutionary roots that reach very far back in time, and conspecific perception is one of the more prominent carryovers from humanity's not-so-distant purely animal past.

With this as backdrop, autistic perception can be characterized as a significant diminution of conspecific perception. Autistic children—by the Mottron team's own definition of prototypical autism—do not have a natural and favored interest for human faces, human voices, human touch, etc., and autistic children do not frequently engage in human interaction, joint-attentive sharing, or people-mimicking behavior. There are two different approaches to depicting this autistic diminution of conspecific perception. As the Mottron team would have it, the characteristics of autistic perception arise from a strong and positive interest in the non-socially biased and raw informational aspects of various environmental features (Mottron et al., 2006). This "enhanced perceptual" interest is the result of a presumed alternative neural-cognitive mechanism (Kéïta et al., 2011; Mottron et al., 2014; Soulières et al., 2009), and its effects are powerful enough to eclipse the usual people-focused foregrounding of conspecific perception. Although this depiction is not an unreasonable hypothesis, it does appear to lack for parsimoniousness. Not only must this explanation postulate a special and mostly unspecified neural-cognitive mechanism, that mechanism must also be capable of producing for each autistic individual a particular and distinctive set of interests chosen from an extremely broad range of perceptual targets. Some autistic children are focused primarily on the auditory domain, others on the tactile domain, and still others on the visual domain. Some autistic children concentrate on geometric objects, such as ceiling fans and lined-up toys, while others concentrate on the repetitions of music and television scenes, while still others hone in on the properties of numbers, letters and words. What brain mechanism, special within the species, could produce such a selectively targeted set of interests across such a motley range of potential targets? And furthermore, why should it be expected that this "enhanced" brain mechanism would drown out the usual conspecific attachment to the other members of the species? If a population were almost entirely right-handed, but a portion of that population had special neural abilities to make extra use of the left hand, why should these special abilities result in exclusive left-handedness, why not instead ambidextrousness? If autistic children have a special neural ability to engage with the non-socially biased aspects of the surrounding environment, why should this special ability preclude their willingness to engage in the usual ways with other people?

The alternative approach to depicting autistic diminution of conspecific perception would be to accept this diminution as a definitive and fundamental fact, and then work out the consequences from there. To begin, since autistic children do not possess as strong a sense of conspecific perception as non-autistic children do, autistic children are more in danger of experiencing an ongoing sensory chaos. For autistic children, human-centric features do not emerge prominently from the manifold of sensory impressions, and this means that, other than some basic biological components, sensory experience for autistic children has the potential of remaining unorganized and ungrounded, a near jumble of undifferentiated sensory noise. The potential for this sensory chaos is evidenced by the frequent reporting of sensory issues in autistic children (Hazen et al., 2014; Kern et al., 2006)—hypersensitivity, hyposensitivity, synesthesia—with the wide variety of these sensory symptoms suggesting they are not the result of a particular physical defect so much as they are the result of a generalized difficulty in organizing sensory experience. And indeed, it can be surmised that the most troubling cases of autism, those in which developmental progress remains minimal, are those cases in which the attainment of a sensory grounding is insufficient to support timely developmental gains.

Nonetheless, most autistic children do not become stuck inside a sensory chaos and most autistic children do go on to make significant developmental progress. Since conspecific perception is not providing the primary means by which sensory experience can be organized, autistic sensory grounding must be getting attained by some other means. Chaos as a term denotes a lack of structure, and chaos can be dispelled by the foregrounded presence of structural properties—symmetry, repetition, pattern, number, form. Needing a sensory grounding to dispel their potential sensory chaos, and lacking a natural human-forward attentive focus, autistic children begin to latch onto those structural features that inherently stand out from the surrounding environment, features that serve to break the background sensory noise. Note the symmetry of ceiling fans and lined-up toys, the repetition of flapping, humming and predictable routines, the patterned and formal properties of calendars and television shows, the shapes and sequences of numbers and letters. Autistic children provide abundant evidence of a structure-forward attentive focus, responding with consistent delight to artifact interaction, pattern-oriented exploration, and form-mimicking behavior. Each instance of an autistic child's so-called restricted and repetitive behavior is an instance thoroughly suffused with structural underpinning, and autistic children do not just prefer these mostly non-human structural experiences, autistic children require them—they are what serve to organize the autistic child's sensory world.

Thus, a special or enhanced neuro-cognitive mechanism is not needed to explain autistic perceptual characteristics—all that is needed is the diminution of conspecific perception, the requirement of a sensory grounding, and the presence of inherently structural features within the surrounding environment. The artificially constructed modern world contains an abundance of these structural targets, and it can be surmised that an autistic child latches onto his or her particular subset of these potential targets through a combination of personal proclivity and random exposure to particular environmental elements. For some it will first be ceiling fans and spinning wheels that emerge from the sensory field, for others it will be rhythmic and musical sounds, and for still others it will be numbers, letters and words. Any circumstance that an autistic child happens upon that boosts that child's sensory grounding will become a circumstance likely to be returned to again and again. And to increase the range of an autistic child's perceptual domain, frequent exposure to a wide variety of structural features, along with encouragement to explore freely, can only be beneficial (Jacques et al., 2018). This is the strongest argument that can be made for aiding the developmental progress of autistic children by leaning into their autistic characteristics, instead of mistakenly suppressing them.

In summary, the significant presence or diminution of conspecific perception determines the non-autistic and autistic perceptual types. Non-autistic perception has deep biological and evolutionary roots, continuing the species-specific perceptual focus evident throughout the entire animal kingdom and accounting for the non-autistic child's natural affinity for human interaction and human engagement. In contrast, autistic perception, lacking this influence of conspecific perception, produces little natural affinity for human interaction and human engagement, but in compensation nudges the autistic child to hone in on those structural features that inherently stand out from the surrounding environment, leading to a structure-forward perceptual focus. This distinction is most apparent during the critical age range of around two to five years. Sometime during this period for non-autistic children, and by the end of this period for autistic children, each perceptual type will begin to overlap with the other. Following the encouragement and instruction of the humans that fascinate them so much, non-autistic children will begin to explore a world of non-human structural features, thereby expanding their perceptual horizons and furthering their developmental course. At the same time, and with their sensory grounding now more firmly established, autistic children soon discover that many of the structural features they have taken such interest in also have human connections and human origins, and this discovery will eventually prompt a secondary interest in the workings of the species itself, including the leveraging powers of language and personal interaction. Given enough time and opportunity, both types of perception can become broadly effective.

Nonetheless, the difference in the genesis of each perceptual type is not to be ignored. There is great significance to the fact that one of these types of perception is biologically typical, and the other type of perception is thoroughly atypical.

4. The Autistic Influence on Behavioral Modernity

The fascinating and stubborn question facing humanity is how did this species transform from being pure animal not more than a few hundred thousand years ago to being the modern creature observed today—talking, writing, calculating, constructing, innovating, driving, flying, and so on. What launched human behavioral modernity, and what sustains its operations today? Many vague suggestions centered around the concepts of evolution and brain intelligence mechanics are frequently tossed around (Klein, 2002; Pinker, 1994), but these suggestions clearly lack for specificity, seldom reaching the level of detailed hypothesis. Furthermore, there is an obvious problem with the timeline. For sake of argument, assume that the beginning of the human behavioral turn happened around two hundred thousand years ago. By fifty thousand years ago, although the evidence of this turn was now unmistakeable—control of fire, structured tools and weapons, cave paintings, etc.—human life was still extraordinarily primitive, a hunter-gatherer's bare subsistence, with virtually nothing of modern culture to be found anywhere within the human environment (Christian, 2018). By ten thousand years ago, agriculture and civilizations were only on the verge of getting started, and by a mere five hundred years ago, the revolutionary impact of modern science had yet to be seen. Almost everything that humans experience today—electricity, fast transportation, effective medicines, vast stores of readily available information—nearly all this has appeared within only the last century or two. Thus, the human transformation has been continuous but it has never been uniform. The human transformation has instead been accelerating, and it continues to accelerate through the present day, its ongoing effects now experienced almost immediately population wide. Vague suggestions centered around the concepts of evolution and brain intelligence mechanics will never fit the dynamics of this unprecedented scenario.

A more effective answer is to be found in the extraordinary expansion of human perception. When humans were still in the state of being pure animals—a period of time lasting for millions of years—their perceptual characteristics would have been the same as those of all the other animal species. Responding to the pressing demands of biological and evolutionary need, human attentive focus would have been directed exclusively to those environmental features crucial for survival and procreation—food, water, danger, sex, etc. Within this biologically driven attentive focus would have been found also the workings of conspecific perception, allowing humans to foreground naturally and frequently the other members of their own species, a trait essential for the various activities promoting survival and procreation. For these ancient humans—as is the case for all the wild animal species—this powerful combination of biological and conspecific perception helped foster the continuation of the lineage, directing all attentive awareness and all resulting behavior towards the essential requirements of evolutionary demand.

However, there is a significant limitation that accompanies this type of perception. As humans have come to realize and to take advantage of in recent years, the surrounding environment contains a plenitude of inherent structure that can provide benefit to a species when used in the right way—for example, the linear forces of gravity, the patterned repetitions of celestial objects, the framework of numerical and symmetrical groupings, and so on. Yet despite these available benefits, no other animal species has ever displayed a perceptual awareness for any of these underlying structural features, and neither did humans for a very long time (Klein, 2009). The powerful combination of biological and conspecific perception is such that it locks each organism into a perceptual and behavioral stasis, leaving the organism fixated entirely on the immediate needs of survival and procreation, and utterly oblivious to everything else. This is why the perceptual and behavioral characteristics of all the wild animal species are so remarkably similar, both across species and across time. With each organism bound to the exact same way of perceiving its environment, each organism is bound also to the exact same set of responsive behaviors—eating and drinking, fighting and fleeing, mating and rearing. Each organism within the species, and each species within the animal kingdom, lives out essentially the same biologically driven existence, again and again and again. It is an existence determined primarily by the restricted attentive focus imposed by biological and conspecific perception.

Therefore, to explain the human turn towards behavioral modernity, it is necessary to explain how this perceptual and behavioral stasis has been broken within the species, and how this stasis has been replaced with the types of expanded perception and resulting behavior that can be observed broadly within the human population today. Vague suggestions centered around the concepts of evolution and brain intelligence mechanics do not even go to the heart of the matter—they specify nothing about the recent dynamics of human perceptual properties. Instead, the question to be asked is as follows: are there any observable characteristics, significantly present within the human population, that can account for a diminishment in the restrictive power of biological and conspecific perception, while at the same time introducing an expanded awareness for the underlying structural properties that humans now take advantage of in overwhelming abundance? The answer to this question is yes. There are such observable characteristics, and they have already been identified earlier in this essay. They are the same perceptual and behavioral characteristics that the Mottron team has outlined in exquisite detail in defining the distinctive nature of prototypical autism.

It remains unclear how and when the size of the autistic population became significant within the human species, but once that significance was reached, its impact would have been persistent and predictable. Not bound by the combined restrictive power of biological and conspecific perception, and driven by sensory need to an awareness of the structural features to be found in the surrounding environment, autistic individuals would have begun to bring these structural features to the perceptual fore, mostly through engagement in the so-called restricted and repetitive behaviors, behaviors that mirror and reconstruct the underlying structural properties autistic individuals naturally perceive. In turn, the non-autistic population, previously locked inside the restrictions of biological and conspecific perception, and yet keenly attuned to what other humans do, would have begun to notice these atypical autistic behaviors and the artificial constructions they engender, eventually adopting these behaviors and constructions for themselves.

This symbiotic process would have been slow and halting at first, but because it results in a permanent and artificial reconstruction of various aspects of the human environment, its impact becomes accretive. The increasing amount of artificial construction accruing within the environment gives autistic individuals an ever-growing array of perceptual targets to latch onto, and the survival-and-procreative efficacy of many of these artificial features—for instance, structured tools and weapons—gives non-autistic individuals an ever-growing incentive to adopt these atypical constructions for themselves. This symbiotic and accelerating process defines the historical pattern of the human behavioral turn, a pattern of increasing environmental reconstruction, built upon an increasing and autistically originated perceptual awareness of the environment's underlying structural properties.

This pattern continues unabated through the present day. It can be seen in the developmental course of non-autistic children, a course established first through the powerful and species-connecting consequence of conspecific perception, and furthered through a species-forward introduction into a broader world of artificial construction, a world valued precisely for the advantages it continues to bring to the species. And the pattern can be seen also in the ongoing discovery of previously unseen underlying structural attributes, a process notably and remarkably dominated by individuals possessing an abundance of autistic-like traits—Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Gauss, Dostoyevsky, Beethoven, Wittgenstein, Turing, to name just a few (James, 2003; Snyder, 2004). The human behavioral turn is still ongoing, and any search for its causal mechanism inside a genetic sequence or a neural signature would be nothing short of folly. Much easier would be to observe the process as it unfolds right before one's very eyes, unfolds in the symbiotic and productive relationship between the non-autistic and autistic types of perception.

5. Normal Autism Science

It was Thomas Kuhn who coined the phrase normal science to denote those stable periods of scientific practice during which revolutionary ideas are seldom considered or explored (Kuhn, 1962). As Kuhn describes it, the work of science during such periods tends to be more technical and incremental in nature, directed towards a shoring up and a promulgation of the prevailing paradigm. In Kuhn's world of the 1950s and 1960s, normal science was embodied in its textbooks, journals, conferences, academic associations, and so on, with these routine proceedings balanced to some extent by the fresh memories of recent upheavals, such as relativity and quantum mechanics. Thus, an equilibrium between normal science and scientific revolution seemed to have been established, and Kuhn was eloquently capturing its outline.

But what Kuhn failed to anticipate was that this particular form of normal science would soon grow into a cancer. Heavily influenced by the twentieth-century surge in governmental and commercial interests, the scientific community had been rapidly transforming from a relatively isolated domain of individuals into a mass operation gainfully employing many millions (Agar, 2012). And to keep this burgeoning crowd under paradigmatic control, science quickly transitioned into a system of professional and collaborative craft. Individuals stopped being individuals and became members of ever-enlarging teams. Scientific method morphed into countless codified standards of practice. Intricate networks of funding were established and soon became a primary and necessary goal. And credentials and citations began to form into a currency of status, the price of admission to the more elite corners of the field. Trampled in this march towards professional and collaborative craft was any interest directed towards individualistic and iconoclastic innovation, the kind of innovation that used to spawn scientific revolutions. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, for all intents and purposes, science had turned into nothing but normal science.

Nowhere is this circumstance more apparent than in the field of autism research. Having established early on a paradigm of autism as a dire medical condition, the autism research community has been leveraging this framework to grow by leaps and bounds (Jiang et al., 2023). The size and number of research teams, the catalogs of practice guidelines, university and government grants, citations and self-congratulatory awards—all have expanded exponentially over the last fifty plus years. And to keep this expansion under professional and collaborative control, autism projects and hypotheses are restricted to an acceptable domain: the search for the genetic markers of autism (Wiśniowiecka-Kowalnik & Nowakowska, 2019), the quest for the neural signatures of autism (Hernandez et al., 2015), the hunt for the metabolic insults of autism (Cheng et al., 2017), and of course the development of treatments and cures (DeFilippis & Wagner, 2016). Perhaps with just a few more research teams, perhaps with just one more set of practice guidelines, perhaps with the essential increase in government grant funding, or perhaps with some additional journal opportunities for self-citation, a breakthrough in an understanding of autism will appear around the corner just about any day. And so goes fifty plus years of normal autism science.

In the meantime, the plight of autistic individuals remains unchanged. Misunderstood and mistreated, autistic individuals continue to be subjected to a broad range of corrective activities: applied behavioral analysis (Gitimoghaddam et al., 2022), depressive drug therapies (LeClerc & Easley, 2015), stem cell experimentation (Siniscalco et al., 2018), and so on—each treatment costing a pretty penny and each treatment designed to suppress autistic characteristics instead of making productive use of them. Normal autism scientists benefit greatly at the hands of normal autism science; autistic individuals suffer.

The Mottron team might be seen as pushing against the boundaries of normal autism science, and to a certain extent this characterization is valid. The Mottron team has been the one autism research team consistently arguing for the potential value of autistic characteristics, and the Mottron team has been the one autism research team willing to offer new theoretical approaches to the condition. But over the years, these efforts have amounted to little more than a chipping at the edges, a token stab at the idea of being revolutionary, with the team ultimately unwilling to venture far from modern science's career-protective walls. So when it comes to embracing a truly atypical conception of autism, and when it comes to considering and exploring autism's monumental impact upon the human species, the Mottron team maintains a comfortable silence. For autistic individuals, such reticence is a tragedy. Because for autistic individuals, of what value is a description of prototypical autism, if its primary purpose is to boost the statistical power of normal autism science?



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