Justice

The recently rendered verdicts in the Autism Omnibus Hearings—unanimously against the petitioners who had sought to blame vaccines as being the cause of their children’s autism—were noteworthy for being uncompromisingly decisive. It was not just that the Special Masters ruled firmly against the petitioners, it was that in their language describing how they arrived at their conclusion, the Special Masters left no room for doubt that the petitioners’ theories in support of an autism-vaccine connection amounted to little more than junk science. Some widely reported quotations from the decisions include:

• "This case … is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ causation theories."
• "The theories petitioners’ experts advanced lacked support in both logic and research."
• "To conclude that (the child’s) condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll’s White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or, at least, highly improbable) things before breakfast."

The Special Masters deserve congratulations for both the clarity and the accuracy of these statements, but I do have one quibble with their judgment. As cogent, forthright, and indeed inspired as these decisions may have been, they remain deficient in one very important respect. They remain deficient in that they are not being applied nearly broadly enough.

Here is a sampling of recent titles from some highly regarded autism research journals:

• Regulation of Cerebral Cortical Size and Neuron Number by Fibroblast Growth Factors: Implications for Autism
• Feasibility and Relevance of Examining Lymphoblastoid Cell Lines to Study Role of MicroRNAs in Autism
• Distinct Patterns of Grey Matter Abnormality in High-functioning Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome
• Electrodermal Reactivity to Emotion Processing in Adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders

Inside these articles—and countless others just like them—you will find attempts to link autism to genetic defects, brain matter abnormalities, synaptic deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, environmental toxins, and hundreds of other factors I do not have the patience to list here. But never mind that a plausible explanation from defect to behavior is never given, never mind that the pathway from deficiency to autistic characteristic is never traveled even one step—backed by the collective might of scientific orthodoxy, these papers’ authors act as though such linkages would present little more in the way of challenge than a beginner student’s exercise. But of course we are not students; we are instead objective observers, and thus we find we must don the White Queen’s garb yet once again. For to consider that all these deficiencies and defects, either individually or collectively, could somehow explain the unique characteristics of any autistic individual within our midst, to say that making such a leap would require us to believe six impossible (or, at least, highly improbable) things before breakfast—well, that would be a judgment almost too kind.

In the current climate, nearly all autism science is junk science. Some of that science may come dressed up in finer laboratory clothes, some of it may be credentialed to the nth degree, some of it may even be persuasive enough while testifying at an Autism Omnibus Hearing; but when it comes to shedding light on this condition we know as autism, when it comes to advancing positively the prospects of autistic individuals, when it comes to being anything except blind to its purpose at hand, the current state of autism research fails to clear even the simplest standard of reason, let alone any standards of science.

The day will come—although I certainly do not expect it anytime soon—the day will come when an entirely different kind of verdict will be rendered. Autism will be adjudged not as a medical disease, not as a gross deficit, not as a burdensome, tragic disorder. Autism will be described as one of the most valuable, the most creative, the most essential aspects of our own humanity—an aspect requiring acceptance, and the occasional accommodation, if humanity is to receive its benefit in full measure. On that day, and on that day alone, will it finally be said that justice has been served, served for the ones who deserve justice the most—the autistic individuals who have been living quietly and productively among us.

Meta-language as a Misuse of the Tool

Since all occurrences of human language are manifested as physically immediate artifacts (visible and tactile gestures, sound vibrations in the air, marks on a page, etc.), language itself, and its use, can be represented by still further recursion of language. Representing language is no different in kind than representing knives and lightning and hair. But this doubling back of language upon itself—alluring like a forbidden fruit—is almost invariably done without sensible purpose.

The normal purpose of language is to make use of a biologically immediate artifact to represent something that is not biologically immediate. But when language represents language, it becomes the use of a biologically immediate artifact to represent something already biologically immediate, and thus confusion easily abounds. Meta-language too often betrays a misuse, and a misunderstanding, of the tool.

The Problem with Early Intervention

My wife is an intuitive genius. One example of her ability to do just the right thing at just the right moment occurred around the time of my son’s third birthday. At that age, Brian still possessed an extremely limited verbal range: he would speak only rarely and when he did speak, his vocabulary consisted of no more than about thirty words, all of them nouns—car, light, etc. No hellos or good-byes. Never a yes or no. Talking held little of interest for him, but what did fascinate him were ceiling fans, especially the three in our house, which he would turn on and off and run back and forth beneath for hours at a time, rubbing his hands together in his quintessential gesture of pure delight.

One afternoon my wife was with Brian while he was playing with the ceiling fan in the family room, and out of the blue she began making a huge, overblown production of everything he was doing. “Wow! Look at how fast that fan is spinning. I can feel its huge breeze, it’s going to blow me away. Wooooooooooooooo. Now look what’s happening. Brian has turned the ceiling fan off, it’s slowing down! Slowwwwing dowwwwn! Almost stopped. Almost! Almost! And … the fan … has … STOPPED!” For a moment, my son must have been a little shell-shocked, no doubt in part because my wife’s behavior was so decidedly over the top, but perhaps also because this was the first time it had been suggested to him that someone else might be as interested in ceiling fans as he was. He switched the fan on, then off again, and in his halting way managed to indicate to my wife that she repeat her soliloquy, in particular its drawn-out, overly dramatic and precisely timed conclusion: “The fan … has … STOPPED!” Then he had her do it again and again.

It was the next morning that my wife and I heard the giggles emanating from the family room followed by their unmistakable, high-pitched punctuation, “Fan … has … STOPPED!”, and the entire episode turned into a watershed event. Brian’s verbal skills skyrocketed from that moment on, and although today, at six years of age, he retains a few of the telltale anomalies—he still mixes up a pronoun now and then, and no one would ever mistake his conversation topics as being anything typical—in terms of range of expression and an ability to articulate his thoughts, I would pit Brian against any English professor I know. He has become a veritable chatterbox.

I relate the above story not so much as an anecdote but as an antidote—an antidote to the now frequent and widespread calls for early intervention against autism. Instead of early intervention, I would like to offer up as an alternative my wife’s intuitive, ingenious, and far more productive approach. I would like to offer up instead the concept of just-in-time exuberance.

Early recognition of autism (not early diagnosis—see here) has the potential of becoming a positive development within the world of autism. If parents, caregivers, educators, and health care providers were given information early on that a child was in all likelihood autistic, and were able to respond to this information in a manner such as the following, “Excellent! Excellent! What a blessing to be in the company of a child so special and with such unlimited potential! Now let’s not get too excited just yet. Let’s not celebrate too much just yet. We must be realistic about this: we need to change some of our ways. We must begin to provide this child with a large variety of items and activities with which to interact—all sorts of shapes, letters, music, textures, and so on—and we need to be aware of which items appeal to him and which do not. And we must capitalize on his interests, and we must give him countless opportunities to expand from there. And praise—heaps and heaps of praise—certainly no less than for any other child, but in this case perhaps a little more. The choices and direction will be ultimately his, but for now we must do all within our power to help him gain as many autistic skills as he can. A little extra work and resources on our part, no doubt. A little more flexibility required from us, no doubt. But of course in the end it will all be worth it, because what greater blessing can there be than to be acquainted with such a unique and valuable child!” If parents, caregivers, educators, and health care providers were to respond to the early recognition of autism in this and similar ways, then indeed early recognition of autism could become a very positive development within our world.

But of course, we must be realistic about this: these days, practically no one responds to the early recognition of autism with joyful cries of just-in-time exuberance. Everyone responds instead with a howling wail for early intervention.

Let us make no bones about what early intervention is, for indeed, the phrase speaks for itself. Early intervention is not the exuberant, enthusiastic development of autistic skills—leveraging the strengths and interests such a child already possesses and is already familiar with. No, early intervention is exactly the opposite. Early intervention is the taking of a young, tender, full-of-potential autistic sprout, and through artificial and sometimes unspeakably cruel means doing all that is possible, all that is considered necessary, to prevent that sprout from ever growing. Early intervention means the suppression of autistic behavior; early intervention means the suppression of all forms of natural autistic expression.

Early intervention derives from a credulous belief in some half-baked, oft-repeated theories about brain matter plasticity at very young ages, alongside many misguided hopes that with intensive corrective action and an invasive non-autistic infusion, a more normal (and thereby easier-to-manage) child will eventually emerge. Thus we see that the enormous amount of psychological naiveté propping up all this widespread belief behind the calls for early intervention in autism is matched only by an equally incredible amount of biological naiveté.

Let us make no bones about what early intervention is. From the point of view of the autistic child—that potential autistic spirit reaching for its rightful place in the sun—early intervention means a relentless and pointless sentence of death.

The most commonly employed tools in early intervention are intensive applied behavioral analysis (ABA), subduing pharmacology, and an assortment of activities I can only describe as biomedical atrocities (such as forced chelation). And of course it is no mere coincidence that nearly all the loudly told tales of autistic negative outcomes, that nearly all the shrilly insisted-upon instances of lower functioning children, that nearly all the screechingly advertised appeals for an inevitable, institutionalized doom—it is no mere coincidence that such tales are accompanied invariably by an attempted history of ABA, pharmacology, and/or biomedical atrocity. It must be only through the grace of God and the resiliency of the autistic mind that not every occurrence of such intervention results in senseless tragedy; but when we consider the now growing trail of broken autistic lives chalked up to the ledgers of early intervention, when we consider how many autistic children have been vanquished through endless, relentless hours of ABA, when we consider the number of young, developing autistic brains overcome by laundry lists of overpowering drugs, when we consider the scores of precious autistic bodies caustically poisoned by chelation, lupron and other nefarious elixirs—when we consider all this unconscionable waste, it raises the question whether the early recognition of autism is indeed such a positive development after all. Would it not be better if this trend towards early recognition were instead to be suddenly reversed? Would it not be better if autistic children were allowed to go forth again as essentially unidentified? Would it not be better if autistic spirits were allowed their chance once more to carve a distinctive path through life—which until just a couple decades ago was a fate nearly every autistic child enjoyed.

My son is autistic. And because he has never been exposed to ABA, risperidone, or any other treatment worthy of the term early intervention, I will accept the combined judgment of the autism professional community, I will accept the collective wisdom behind that community’s superior knowledge, I will accept that by now the opportunity to reshape Brian’s growing brain, the opportunity to dramatically alter his autistic path—that opportunity has passed him by. I will accept that by now my son is not only autistic, but that indeed he is hopelessly autistic.

Hopelessly autistic as he counts backwards by threes and fives. Hopelessly autistic as he reads accurately through all his button books. Hopelessly autistic as he delights in roller coasters, water slides, marble runs, piano keyboards and a list of assorted games. Hopelessly autistic as he knowingly explains the earth’s tilt, rotation and the timing of the solstice. And hopelessly autistic as he chatters through his own creative renditions of so many ceiling fan soliloquies.

To every professional who has ever clamored for the merits of early intervention in autism, to every professional who has ever insisted upon the value of redirecting autistic lives while they remain still pliable, to every professional who has ever suggested that in the absence of early intervention the autistic outcome will likely be something grim—to every such professional, you are invited to spend the day alongside my chattering, delightful, ceiling-fan obsessed son (and alongside the parents who could not be more blessed than to be in his presence). You are invited to spend that day and then in all seriousness to explain—what exactly would you have proposed to do?

The Problem with Peer Review

Genuine scientists, the ones who can unveil surprising, valuable and enduring insights into our experienced world—scientists such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein—they have no peers. Scientists for hire on the other hand can be found around every corner, and of course filling out all the editorial review boards.

Scientific Insight

What level of research grant supported Newton’s Principia project? What funding organization sponsored Darwin’s laboratory of origined species? Who footed all the bills during Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis?

Why is it the forgettable science requires hundreds of thousands of dollars and entails an unspecified amount of time, whereas the memorable science costs nary a cent, and happens in no more than a flash?

Identification Bias

Because autism was first taken to be a medical condition—a type of mental illness—its ongoing recognition has always suffered from a very bad case of identification bias.

Around forty to fifty years ago, the only cases of autism being diagnosed were those for which the individual was clearly detached from usual behaviors and circumstances, and was clearly in need of support and services. This practice made sense, because at that time autism was assumed to be an acute medical condition and therefore only individuals meeting the criteria of an acute medical condition could be identified as having autism. No one else was ever identified as having autism, and of course autism was thought to be extremely rare.

However, a problem soon emerged: the medical community began recognizing many individuals who possessed most of the same features as those being diagnosed with autism, but who obviously were not suffering from an acute medical condition. This should have alerted the medical community that its initial assumption about autism being a medical condition was now seriously in doubt; but identification bias had already set in, had already become too firmly entrenched, and no serious questioning of that assumption ever took place. When one reads, for instance, Lorna Wing’s work—the work that began the process of bringing Asperger syndrome into the diagnostic fold—one is struck by how the new identifying criteria, although distinguished from the criteria used on the more classically diagnosed cases, was still making the assumption of a major underlying cognitive impairment, was still assuming the presence of a serious medical condition. And so, as terms such as high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, and pervasive developmental disorder began to assume more widespread usage, the specter of medical illness never loosened its grip on autism at all—it merely began enveloping a much larger population within its darkening cloud.

That trend continues unabated to the present day. Using an expanding range of diagnostic tools and applying them at earlier and earlier ages, the medical community now identifies nearly one percent of the toddler population as possessing some form of autism, and because of identification bias, that entire one percent is assumed to be suffering from a dire medical condition. With no consideration for whether the expected outcome might be positive or negative, and with no recollection of the statistics from its own diagnostic past, the medical community assumes every child identified as being autistic will require a regimen of early intervention, will need an onslaught of powerful drugs, intensive therapies, and assorted prescriptive treatments. It never occurs to the medical community that its own history of autism identification has now progressed all the way from rare to questionable to absurd. It never dawns on the medical community that nearly the entire one percent now being identified as mentally ill, was only one half century ago being identified with not one sickness at all.

It is not too late to turn back the clock—even some fifty years. Autism has never been a medical condition. That stranglehold of an assumption is only the residue from a lazy history of bias.

Stuck (a.k.a. A Status Report on the Autism Knowledge Revolution)

Geraldine Dawson, the newly minted Chief Science Officer for Autism Speaks, has recently penned a public letter outlining the many achievements that were made under the banner of autism science during the year 2008. Although one might suppose churning out such letters is a necessary condition of her job (one should probably view all artifacts coming out of Autism Speaks in the light of being a necessary condition of the job), Dr. Dawson manages nonetheless to prove the aptness of her appointment by tackling this particular task with some gusto and delight. Her catalog of recent advancements in the areas of autism research and treatment is both lengthy and wide ranging, and her tone throughout the roll call of progress remains unflinchingly upbeat and enthusiastic. It would seem 2008 was a decidedly exceptional year in the world of autism science, so decidedly exceptional that I found I could not help but break out into hearty peals of laughter while reading through the letter’s contents.

To give just a sampling of the many paradigm-shifting discoveries that have been tickling Dr. Dawson’s scientific fancy over these past twelve months, I would note that in the area of genetic research she begins by lauding some recent reports involving aspects of chromosome 16, which in 2008 apparently became only the twenty-third human chromosome to be implicated as the presumptive locative cause of autism. And related to this insightful finding (well, related by means of being mentioned in the following paragraph) Dr. Dawson extols some other recent research regarding the CNTNAP2 gene, which as it turns out has also been implicated as the presumptive locative cause of autism, but in an entirely different way. Not one to be embarrassed by such abundance of riches, Dr. Dawson turns her acclamatory sights next on an entirely different class of explanatory breakthroughs, that is to say those bountiful number of environmental factors that have been significantly correlated to autism sometime during the past calendar year: the mother’s use of epileptic drugs during pregnancy, premature birth, prenatal exposure to high levels of pesticides or insecticides, seizures during infancy, living in regions that experience high levels of precipitation, and being born in April, June, and October. (And lest some wag suggest I merely fabricated that list for the sake of literary hyperbole—or perhaps out of an uncontrollable urge to poke some fun—let me assure such wag I possess not nearly the degree of orneriness or creativity to do any such thing, let me assure such wag I merely plagiarized the list from an unattributed source.) Having announced the solution to autism’s puzzle twice over now, Dr. Dawson nonetheless eschews any resting on autism science’s overflowing laurels, but proceeds thereafter to a garnering of the trifecta, quadfecta, and many fectas well beyond. She trumpets for instance the foremost importance of the case of Hannah Poling, mitochondria and multiple vaccinations, proving beyond any reasonable grain of doubt that 2008 must have been indeed one uniquely incredible year in the area of autism research, seeing as how even courtroom drama and bad journalism were able to lend a helping hand. And more kudos are then offered up for the invaluable knowledge gained through the latest incarnation of the neuronal TSC model of mice, Dr. Dawson hinting thereby that a complete mapping of autism's biochemical mechanism remains as imminent as the shake of a rat’s tail.

The drum roll of incisive achievements bangs on and on; but for the sake of brevity (not to mention some sanity), allow me to present the remainder of the bangs as cleanly as I dare: secreted amyloid precursor protein-alpha, maternal antibody reactivity, synaptic abnormalities and hippocampus inhibitions. Ah yes, what an exhaustive and exhausting list Dr. Dawson has managed to compile! Really, I could hardly catch my breath. Indeed, by the time I finally reached the end of her expansive missive and its much belated sign-off (well after midnight, I can assure you), I had become absolutely convinced that there must have been no essential autism research advancement overlooked, no Nobel Prize worthy stone of discovery unturned in Dr. Dawson’s bell-ringing, end-of-the-year review. Alas, that conclusion proved to be somewhat giddy and premature, for when I checked the letter again the following day, perused it in the sober light of morning—not once, not twice, but indeed three more times—I discovered with no small sense of dismay that the kitchen sink never received one mention.

Maybe next year.

If someone were to publish a particularly difficult mathematics conjecture and were to advertise for solutions, and this challenge were to be greeted by seven answers the first year, twenty-six the next, a hundred and seven the year after that, and four hundred or so the year following, it would take a distinctly misguided form of intellect to characterize such results as progress. Only one lick of common sense would be enough to expose such a billowing set of solutions as not the harbinger of any impending answer, but instead the unmistakable sign that the problem has not been in the slightest understood. But of course I must be forgetting the context of this analogy; I must be forgetting that if there is any concept for which Autism Speaks is the least likely to provide some funding, the least likely to bequeath one of its generous research grants to—or to install a Chief Officer for—that would have to be the concept called common sense.

Never mind that the exact same form of Dr. Dawson’s letter would have been just as serviceable in 2007, or in 2006, or in so many of the years prior to that, with only a small smattering of detail substitution required to invoke the earlier date (different chromosomes, different environmental factors, different biomedical markers, different mice). Never mind that Dr. Dawson and her successors will no doubt be penning nearly identical letters again at the end of 2009, 2010, and for countless years beyond that, with each new pronouncement distinguished only by a similar set of substitutions. No, never mind all that, for that would be a mere caviling over minutiae, that would be a quibbling about some absurd trivialities—and besides we have the evidence of Dr. Dawson’s unbridled enthusiasm to assure us that 2008 was an annum entirely different. No, I would much rather grant Dr. Dawson all her ballyhooed triumphs, I would much rather take her at her gustoed and delighted word. But that does raise a troubling question, does it not—a question that must be lurking there at the back of our troubled minds. How is it possible, we finally ask, how is it possible that with 2008 having been autism science’s unparalleled banner year, how is it possible that with such earth-shattering advancements on such a broad variety of absolutely essential fronts—genetic research brilliancies, environmental factor epiphanies, biochemical conquests—how is it possible that when furthermore we have had the AGRE data base, government settlement cases and some rodents chipping in, how is it possible that we did not manage to demystify autism completely, how is it possible that we did not put this condition’s perplexing questions entirely to bed, how is it possible that in 2008 we did not resolve autism’s conundrum finally once and for all, resolve it at the very latest by mid July?

We should bear in mind that Dr. Dawson’s letter does serve a valuable purpose. It is a purpose not to be found directly in her words of course, but instead in the cloud of comedy and irony overhanging her epistolary litany. Through hers and similar exploding laundry lists of so-called essential, breakthrough successes in the fields of autism science and research, we are brought at long last to the realization that in point of fact we are achieving little more than a loud spinning of all the wheels, a gratuitous grinding of all the gears—the spinning perhaps a little louder, the grinding a little more gratuitous with each passing year. On the road to any true understanding of this condition we call autism, science is in fact not making the slightest progress at all; it is instead racing hell-bent in the direction of becoming irretrievably stuck.

Hello Again

This most recent pause in the blog posts was not planned—I broke my left hand in late November and have found it difficult to create new entries in the mean time. (It’s odd: I once was an inveterate hunt-and-pecker, but now I can’t seem to compose a meaningful sentence without complete use of all fingers on all hands.) I’m nearly on the mend now and should be able to begin posting again shortly.

A thank you to Steve D and Fleecy for their recent mentions of Autistic Aphorisms. Both their blogs by the way are informative, thoughtful and well-written; if you haven’t taken a look already, please do so.

And a belated Happy New Year to everyone!

Kierkegaard as Educator

For that school girl clique of oh-so-cutting edge atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and the remainder of their huddling masses)—I would have it take note of Kierkegaard, who standing all by himself, did not choose the cowardly path of abolishing religious thought, but bravely took aim at what religion had become.

I too—I have not the slightest desire to put an end to scientific practice, I merely draw a bead on what science has become.

Autism as a Puzzle Piece

Autism advocacy and charity groups (such as Autism Speaks) like to depict autism as a puzzle piece. Oddly enough, so do I.

When I first learned about autism in detail, I was already forty-five years old and the subject had barely crossed my mind before that time. What had been on my mind over the years were questions regarding humanity and its universe, for you see I am one those poor souls prone to ruminate over such mysteries as language, intelligence, science, psychology and history. Those ruminations had taken me not all that far; it seemed I had barely formed the frame of some gigantic puzzle—one of utmost importance to be sure, but one also quite empty near its middle, a crucial hole right there at its center.

Then without warning, autism knocked at my door.

Like Suzanne Wright, I could have said autism had knocked on the wrong door, for given the way it was being introduced to me—as mental illness, as medical catastrophe, as a burden only autism advocacy and charity groups could offer to remove—viewed like that, autism clearly had no bearing on my unfinished puzzle at all. But at forty-five years of age, I had no preconceived notions, I had no existing stake in autism’s conventional wisdom; so I felt at liberty to examine the subject from all sides, felt audacious enough to dare to flip it over. And lo and behold—now no longer seen as mental illness, no longer viewed as medical catastrophe, no longer taken as the pity fodder for autism advocacy and charity groups—autism snapped cleanly into place, the snuggest puzzle piece I could ever hope to find.

The Simple Greeting Exchange

“How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

The simple greeting exchange—which technically does not constitute a meaningful use of language—serves as fertile ground for understanding some fundamental differences between autistic and non-autistic perspectives, and also serves as an occasion for respecting and valuing those differences.

The simple greeting exchange, especially as practiced by non-autistic individuals, is the quintessence of biological immediacy. If the verbal aspect of the exchange can be said to be about anything, it is about what is already biologically present—two members of the species Homo sapiens interacting within the same immediate time and space constraints as the conversation itself. That is why it can be said that technically speaking, the exchange is not a meaningful use of language. Language is ordinarily the use of a biologically immediate artifact (spoken sounds, for instance) to represent something that is not biologically present (an event removed in space or time, for instance). In the simple greeting exchange, everything that needs to be conveyed is already present, so of what purpose is the language?

In the simple greeting exchange—with the exception of the words—everything is ancient and complex. Such exchanges have been taking place on this planet from almost the beginning of biology itself, and although each exchange happens in no more than an instant, each occurrence also conveys a cornucopia of species-driven information forged from the long-burning furnace of evolutionary time. Observe two members of almost any animal species as they come together—ants along the trail, lions in their den, barracuda on the prowl—each exchange is just as eloquent, just as informational, as any end-of-the-month business transaction. In mammals—and in primates especially—this exchange is brought about by means of a precise set of sensory-based conventions—eye contact, body posture, clucks and coos, nuzzles, sniffs, licks, etc. Not a word ever needs to be spoken; and in all the other animal species, not a word is spoken. The other animal species have no conception of a yesterday or a tomorrow, no conception of a mile to the east or a mile to the west; so the other animal species have no need for language. And least of all do they have need for language during the simple greeting exchange—the epitome of conversational biological immediacy.

Humans were like this once too; and if we remove their words, we see that they still are.

Language was a late arrival on the human scene, and its purpose is far removed from being an aid to conversational biological immediacy. If the words of the simple greeting exchange can be said to have meaning beyond just their immediate occasion (an occasion that needs no words), it might be said that they serve as a marker, an indicator—they mark the occasion of a biologically immediate conversation. Humans—and in particular non-autistic humans—take the words of the simple greeting exchange as the signal the intricate dance of eye contact, body posture, etc. has begun. Or to give the notion more sophistication, humans might be said to be using the simple greeting exchange as an indicator that this is not an instance of biological immediacy qua animal, but instead an instance of biological immediacy in the context of greater civility. (But then again, each participant was already aware of that.)

In the simple greeting exchange, the text dissolves to nothing, and the subtext expands to incorporate everything.

Autistic individuals often find themselves discomfited by the simple greeting exchange. One of the reasons for this is that autistic individuals will often take the simple greeting exchange quite literally—that is, they will take it as an expression of language. For instance, they understand “fine” to be an accurate report of the other person’s status, only to discover perhaps that circumstances are otherwise (“Couldn’t you see the anger in my face?” the other will say). In response to “How are you?” or “What’s been happening?”, autistic individuals will often provide a detailed and factual account of their recent situation—spatially, temporally and logically arranged—and will find themselves bewildered when they realize the other person is bewildered by the reply.

Language, by its original intent, bridges the gap between biological immediacy and the more remote realms of space, time and non-biological structure and pattern. Autistic individuals intuitively understand this, because cognitively speaking, they exist far more comfortably inside those remote realms.

“How many ceiling fans do you have in your house?”

“What an interesting question! I have three ceiling fans in my house.”

“What rooms are they in?”

“Let’s see…there is one in the living room, one in the bedroom, and another one on the porch.”

“Is the ceiling fan on the porch spinning?”

The autistic greeting exchange is a work of art, although it is seldom recognized as such. It is a work of art primarily because it uses language almost exclusively in its original and creative form—as a biologically immediate artifact intended to represent, or to inquire about, an event spatially, temporally or biologically removed. When the autistic greeting exchange goes well, an autistic participant feels informed, and thus also feels comforted and welcomed—the same feelings a non-autistic individual receives upon a successful simple greeting exchange.

In the autistic greeting exchange, the text encompasses everything, and the subtext disappears.

Imagine a behavioral speech therapist trying to teach the simple greeting exchange to a young autistic child—employing countless discrete trials, wondering why progress is so painfully slow, perplexed by how the skill does not transfer outside the training room. But if the therapist were instead to teach the child the autistic greeting exchange—incorporating ceiling fans, light switches, Thomas the Tank Engine, or whatever else might be of interest to this particular child—would not the child’s attention perk up almost immediately? Would not progress be considerably faster and the skills more widely practiced? “But that is not the goal,” the therapist will object. “The goal is not to have the child greet people with inappropriate banter about ceiling fans, light switches or Thomas the Tank Engine. The goal is to have the child greet people with the simple greeting exchange.”

“Inappropriate” is indeed the correct adjective here, but not applied to the banter. Is the aim of this therapy to teach the child the use of language, or to make the child indistinguishable from all his peers?

Autistic individuals will often bemoan the pettiness and insincerity of the simple greeting exchange, but that is a misunderstanding—they are overlooking billions of year of intricate and essential biology.

Non-autistic individuals will often decry the inappropriateness of the autistic greeting exchange, but that is also a misunderstanding—they are overlooking the glory, and the origin, of a creative use of words.

(Thanks to Bev at Asperger Square 8 for the inspiration.)

Good Housekeeping

I can hear a clamoring for more detail, for more evidence: outline your experiment, enunciate your theory, where is your data? But I cannot scurry fast enough from all that, I cannot step far enough away.

Thousands of researchers cook up millions of details each and every day, but who bothers to arrange the shelves, and who will tidy up the mess?

Diagnosis is the Wrong Word

We say that autism is diagnosed, but the word diagnosis rests on a shaky foundation, the danger of which is never more apparent than when we promote early diagnosis for young children.

To employ the word diagnosis means to accept the assumption that autism is a medical condition or a mental illness, but this is precisely the assumption most in doubt. The medical community, which on one hand acts with unbridled certainty that autism is indeed a mental disorder, a brain-based illness, on the other hand admits the cause of autism remains entirely unknown and there is no known effective cure. So where does the certainty come from in the first place?

What if autism were not a medical condition, not a mental illness? Would we be able to discern that possibility, given that we have put the blinders on?

Those who speak favorably of early diagnosis for young children inevitably follow with the phrase early intervention. But how can early intervention be considered safe and effective if there is no known cause? How can early intervention be deemed appropriate if we remain uncertain of what autism is? The treatment of a non-existent illness is not necessarily benign.

Not that long ago the diagnosis of autism was an extremely rare event. Are we certain that those who went undiagnosed—and who therefore went untreated—are we certain their outcomes were inevitably tragic?

The correct word is recognition. We now know enough about autism to recognize it in certain individuals, including some who are very young. But recognition is all we have.

Derrida

But we had already seen this medicine show! Hegel’s puffoonery once pulled the wool over the eyes of an entire academic generation and sent countless grandstudents into a Rube Goldberg slumber. Note the reaction of both Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard—cogent, inspired, extraordinarily well written, as though the point to be demonstrated above all else is that when one has something worthy to say, one takes the trouble to say it well.

Universal Grammar

The term is correct, but universal grammar has been given a meaning that does not match what those two words actually say.

Noam Chomsky’s early work in linguistics deserves the highest praise. Before such efforts as Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, linguistics was stuck in a quagmire of piecemeal analysis—an irrelevant quicksand of phonemes, morphemes and dead-end semantics. Chomsky unearthed language’s structural essence and gave it prominence and value, and his clever introduction of the tools of logic and recursive mathematics furnished linguistics with a language of its own, one that remains useful to the present day.

But Chomsky badly misguessed the source of language’s structural underpinning, and in fact it is a bit of a puzzle he had to make a guess at all. Having spent countless obsessive hours working out the many transformational rules of verbal syntax (his complete Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory is so massive I believe it has yet to be published in its entirety), Chomsky had ample opportunity to recognize that his linguistic schemas had much in common with the formal rules of physics, mathematics, logic, chemistry, digital electronics and so many other non-biological disciplines. Space, time, proof, natural law, formal syntax—these concepts are in many ways so structurally similar they border on being isomorphic; so how could Chomsky have failed to recognize that as he was sketching out the structure of human language, he was also sketching out the basic structure of the perceived world? But such was the allure of brain science dogma even some forty odd years ago—Chomsky turned to biology instead and posited an instinct for human language.

To be fair, Chomsky was handicapped by two critical pieces of evidence: one piece of evidence, in plain sight, proved to be an over-enticing red herring, and the other piece of evidence, far more useful and productive, was alas not available to Chomsky at all.

The red herring of course was the speed and seeming ease with which most children acquire a spoken language. That an instinct was at the heart of this process was undeniable, but first to be determined was whether an already known instinct could adequately account for the phenomenon. The young of many species pass through a relatively brief period of rapid assimilation of the species’ behaviors—learning to hunt, to find shelter, meld to the group social dynamics, etc.—all leading very quickly to adult-level skills in the areas of survival and procreation. What these maturational activities make clear is that it is not so much the activities themselves that are instinctual as is the pedigree of being intensely species aware and species assimilative. Acute species recognition, to the degree of nearly complete perceptual exclusion of all other sensory input, is the common evolutionary thread explaining how the young of so many species rapidly transform into nearly exact behavioral copies of all the other members of the population. And of course humans have been no different. When humans were once silent hunter-gatherers, their children rapidly matured into being exactly the same, taking on many fully developed roles by the age of puberty. And when humans swiftly transformed into being verbal and more civilized, the children did not skip a maturational beat, just as rapidly assuming the new set of common behaviors, and at a very early age. What most children have an instinct for is to do what other humans do; it has been that way for a very long time, and it still is.

But Chomsky was convinced language had to be something different. With page after page of formulas and recursions laid out before him, aware more than anyone of the complexity running throughout the entirety of semantics and syntax, Chomsky found it inconceivable so much surface variation and core structural similarity could be acquired quickly by species assimilation alone. In this, he was being hurt by his failure to see that it was not just language that was being acquired, but also all the behaviors, conventions and perceptions mirrored inside of language, along with their corresponding degrees of structure and complexity. For Chomsky, language seemed to be monolithic, independent of the other new aspects of human behavior—independent of the changing human environment. Furthermore, language seemed to be something that had to be inherently unique to this one species alone. Hunting behaviors, sheltering behaviors, hierarchal behaviors—these too are extraordinarily complex and their quick absorption is no less amazing than the absorption of language; but with thousands of other species serving as example, and with the long reach of evolutionary time helping to soothe any concerns over how such behavioral complexity might be taken on, a scientist is less apt to doubt the species assimilative forces when applied to such time-honored and widely distributed skills. Not so language, the late-arriving exemplar nonpareil. And even supposing Chomsky could have brought himself to accept that language might be absorbed by the usual species assimilative means, this would only have raised a much larger question in his head: where did language come from in the first place? Having appeared quite suddenly on this planet, and having arrived nearly full blown as it were, like Athena from Zeus’s head, language could not chalk up its origin, at the very least, to some typical hand-me-down inter-generational event.

Faced with language’s seemingly unique standing in the biological world, and hampered by the unanswered question regarding its origin, Chomsky resorted finally to some scientific magic and proposed an entirely separate instinct for human language. Thus in one fell swoop Chomsky turned language into something biological, genetic, neural, evolutionary, and above all else, restrictively human. The term universal grammar debuted as an ironic phrase, for now there was nothing universal in the concept at all.

The more productive piece of evidence Chomsky did not have access to was an accurate description of the condition known as autism. Autism of course was known in the 1960s and 1970s, but at that time was regarded as little more than a medical catastrophe, its gravity compensated for only by its extreme rarity. Those few autistic individuals who were recognized in Chomsky’s day, both from the acuteness of their condition and from the cruelties likely being perpetrated upon them, would not have been able to provide many useful clues in a study of general linguistics. It would take at least another twenty years before the medical community would begin to realize autism was a condition not necessarily so devastating—and uncoincidentally, not all that uncommon—and of course even to the present day the medical community continues to struggle under the delusions from that misguided past.

Autism, when more accurately described, tells a much broader story than has been heretofore considered—a story touching directly upon, among many other things, the history and construction of human language.

Fundamentally, autistic individuals possess a significantly less degree of species recognition and species assimilative capacity than do most other humans (and indeed, than do most organisms). For yet unknown reasons, autistic humans do not readily perceive the human-specific features of their sensory environment, and in consequence they do not easily assimilate to the species itself. Therefore, initial autistic sensory perception goes forth mostly ungrounded, and early autistic cognitive development must run a gauntlet of a nearly overwhelming sensory chaos. In compensation and in varying measure, most autistic individuals form their cognitive grounding instead out of the non-biological features that inherently stand out from the surrounding environment—perceptions based upon symmetry, pattern, structure, detail, repetition, and the like. The unusual early behaviors of autistic children are chock-full of the consequences from these unique forms of perception and cognition, and the ongoing behaviors of nearly all autistic individuals—from childhood through maturity—show marked preference for the more orderly, non-biological aspects of the objective world than for the social, biologically-based features preferred by the human population at large.

Space, time, logic, mathematics—these concepts, representing the structural framework of the objective world, were first introduced into the human species through the medium of autistic perception, and they are the by-product of a compensatory form of autistic cognition that finds its essential grounding in the symmetries and patterns to be found in the surrounding environment.

Autistic individuals, however, despite their non-biological cognitive grounding, are biological creatures themselves and are therefore subject to the same experiential restrictions as any other organism. Space, time, logic, mathematics—these concepts cannot be directly grasped by immediate perception alone, they are not inherently part of immediate biological experience. To bring non-biologically based perception into the realm of immediate biological experience requires the aid of an intermediary; it requires the use of an artifact that can be immediately perceived but which also serves the purpose of representing something not biologically present. This intermediary is precisely that object we call language, and if autistic individuals have been responsible for introducing the realm of non-biological pattern and structure into the human species, they have also been responsible for bringing along its essential companion—they have been responsible for the introduction of language.

If Chomsky had been able to surmise this autism-inspired origin of human language, then perhaps he would have been less mystified by language’s ubiquitous structure.

As the early artifacts of human language—abstract gestures to some degree, but primarily spoken sounds—as these began to circulate around the globe, they quickly diverged in both vocabulary and surface form. But as Chomsky has rightly noted, the underlying structure of human language changed hardly at all, never varied in any appreciable degree from tribe to tribe, place to place, generation to generation. This split between language’s surface presentation and its underlying structural form captures exactly that distinction between the arbitrary nature of the object doing the representing, and the far more determinant nature of the object being represented. Only the artifacts of language can be indeterminate, only they can take on a nearly unlimited variety of form: hundreds of spoken languages, thousands of individual dialects, written and encoded extensions (shuffling language across the expanses of space and time), signs and symbols, charts and schematics. As humans have so amply demonstrated, almost any sense-perceptible item can serve the purpose of conveying a language—all that is required is some degree of convention—but if the artifacts of language can come from almost any perceivable source, what language represents is something entirely different. What language represents, by necessity and original intent, is something already perceptually determined.

Space, time, logic, mathematics, pattern, symmetry—these concepts, representing the form of the objective world, are precisely those concepts that must be reflected inside language’s foundational structure. Object and concept, noun and verb, temporal tenses, spatial adjectives, all manner of nuanced prepositional form—as autistics brought to humanity the patterned structures from the surrounding world, they also brought to humanity the conveying mechanism that by necessity had to assume that world’s inherent organizational form. There is no need to posit a genetic, biological or neural instinct to explain language’s ubiquitous structure: one need only look to the pattern and symmetry of the perceived world and realize that language has no choice but to be its mirror. And one need not confine language to the human species alone: any life-form open to the non-biological patterns of the surrounding environment will by necessity find itself relying upon the mechanisms of a deeply foundational language, because biologically speaking, there are no alternative means.

And so indeed, human language has been framed by a universal grammar—far more universal than Chomsky ever managed to conceive.

Music and Raven’s Progressive Matrices

Elsewhere I have noted that the Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test may be the nearest thing humans have to a pure time and space test. The Raven’s temporal/spatial problem domain, natural to autistic perception and cognition, helps explain why autistic individuals perform so differentially well on that particular test.

Yet now that I think about it, there is at least one other human endeavor that shares a similar structure to the Raven’s test—namely music. The roles played by rhythm, melody and harmony are quite analogous to the roles played by time, space and conceptual pattern in Raven’s, and the well-documented affinity and natural ability for music that many autistic individuals display is further suggestive of an underlying connection.

Time, space, geometry, arithmetic, logic, melody, harmony, rhythm, games, rules, syntax—these concepts run along the contours and fault lines of autistic cognition, and understanding their connection helps to highlight the nature of autistic perception and to characterize its contribution to human endeavor. Music and the Raven’s intelligence test are not random gewgaws from the stream of life—their prominence derives from a correlation to the forces driving the human species forward.

Health Coverage

Many efforts are currently underway to mandate insurance and state coverage for the various types of autism medical treatment. These efforts are premature.

Not in any way certain of the condition it is dealing with, and ignoring its charge to first do no harm, the medical community is offering a scattershot and dangerous approach to autism treatment—oppressive applied behavioral analysis, overpowering pharmacology, wide-ranging interventive therapy, and a few doses of biomedical quackery thrown in for good measure. What these treatments have in common is that none are designed to promote autistic capacity; all are designed to shut it down.

When attitudes have changed, when humanity has examined autism for what it truly is, when medical efforts have turned from suppression and cure—and towards autistic achievement—only then will autism coverage become a worthwhile investment, and not the drain of resources and human dignity that it currently is.

When Science Goes a Whoring

It is not for idle purpose I shine light on the community of autism research journals. The attitudes backing practices of piled-on authorship, sycophantic peer review, citation back-scratching and editorial board nepotism are the very antithesis of science. (And I have yet to mention the harm being done to autistic individuals.)

The Dual Root of Human Language

Human language has shot forth from two distinct roots, from two different sources of fundamental influence.

The first source has been the temporal, spatial and logistical pattern that constitutes the order of the surrounding, non-biological world. This influence is seen most clearly in language’s underlying structure: object and concept, noun and verb, temporal tenses, spatial adjectives, and all manner of nuanced prepositional form. This particular aspect of language did not arise from humanity’s biological and evolutionary past, but instead came from out of the struggles of an unusual interloper; it came from the autistic perceptions and cognitions that have gained foothold within the human population. Autistic individuals, who by definition are not cognitively grounded by the usual species-aware perceptions, have created a cognitive grounding instead out of the patterns and symmetries to be found in the surrounding environment. But as biological creatures themselves, and needing to convey this unique form of perception both to themselves and to others, autistics have uncovered also the only biologically immediate means by which a non-biologically immediate perception can be represented—they have uncovered the essential accompaniment called language.

However, as has happened on many other occasions of autistic discovery and introduction, language was quickly adopted, transformed and widely spread by the more plentiful non-autistic members of the human population, and thus human language soon acquired a significant second root. This influence appears most noticeably in the core vocabularies of the world’s languages, which are dominated by words, phrases and metaphors derived out of humanity’s evolutionary and animal past, revealing that as the majority of humans were introduced to the possibilities of language, they quickly adapted its content (autistics might say they corrupted its content) to reflect those features of existence more natural and essential to them—the businesses of eating, excreting, tribalizing and procreating. Furthermore, the core content of human language is also that aspect most often accompanied by non-verbal cues and subtext, suggesting that not that long ago mankind conducted its survival and procreative business without the aid of abstract language, conducted it entirely through the medium of immediate gesture and inter-social behavior (much as the other animals do). Abstract language was the latecomer, and upon its introduction it was layered on top of an already extant form of biological communication, and both layers now play a crucial role in the immediate conversations of today. (And of course it is worth noting that it is the non-verbal, instinctively perceived aspect of human communication that autistic individuals have the most difficulty learning and mastering.)

In the early twenty-first century, human language remains a blend of its two sources of influence, and appears to resist most pulls towards becoming an homogenized mixture. The evolutionary, biological source of influence continues to hold prominence as the most frequently employed aspect of human language—from small talk to international diplomacy—and thus continues to serve its purpose of being the linguistic glue that helps hold the species together. But an examination of language’s accelerating number of changes and additions, especially those introduced over the last several hundred years, reveals how the autistic root of language has become increasingly more influential over time, threatening to regain once more what might be described as its birthright. The periodic table, representational painting, box scores, blueprints—one does not have to look far to recognize how the non-biological, non-evolutionary aspect of human language has been rapidly transforming the behavior of the species and reorganizing the manner in which it communicates. And consider the education of children—the majority of whom can pick up the core, biological aspects of language by the time they are five—but who require with each new generation more and more time, and a much greater variety of instructional technique, to absorb just a fraction of the new language and new communicative structure that has been added in recent years.

There is much that can be learned about the current status of our own humanity by teasing out the various structures and contents of the expanding forms of our human language, an analysis that becomes fruitful only after recognizing that human language did not spring from a single source alone.

Lost and Found

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have written about today’s “lost generation” of adults who are currently being diagnosed, long after their childhood has ended, with various forms of autism (usually Asperger Syndrome):

But what of the generation who were born before 1980, who may have had Asperger Syndrome but for whom there was no diagnosis available? No specialist clinical teams, not even the concept of Asperger Syndrome. How did they fare? The answer is that they were overlooked, and struggled through their school years. And the reason we run a clinic for the very late diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome is because these are the lost generation: those who today would receive their diagnosis by 6 or 8 years old, if they were a 21st century child. They come to our clinic in young adulthood or even middle age, and they tell us a now-familiar story.

All through their school years they had trouble making friends or fitting in. Many were bullied by the other children, both physically and verbally. Many felt, in Claire Sainsbury’s chilling words, like “an alien in the playground”. (This is the title of her excellent book). The lucky ones managed to stay in school long enough to get their SATs, and some got to university. But not without feeling their teens were an uphill struggle. By young adulthood many had suffered clinical depression and even felt suicidal. All because their underlying condition of Asperger Syndrome had gone unrecognized and therefore unsupported. Some of them had enjoyed the closeness of an intimate relationship only for this to break down. Some had found employment only for them to run into problems in the work place through not understanding what the employer and other staff might expect of them, or through getting into conflict, or being passed over for promotion because of their lack of team skills.

But only a moment’s reflection reveals something grossly amiss in Baron-Cohen’s description. The above paragraphs imply there has been only one lost generation of autistic adults—the generation born before 1980—but how can that possibly be? What about the previous generation, say the ones who were born in the 1940s and 1950s? Or those born in the early 1900s? Or what about those born in the 1800s, and even much earlier than that? Does Baron-Cohen mean to suggest autism descended en masse upon humanity sometime in the late twentieth century, and are we meant to understand there were no autistic adults living among us until a few began showing up outside the door of his clinic, desperate for relief (so he says) from the wretched circumstances he and his colleagues would have thrust upon them?

This generation of autistic adults Baron-Cohen is attempting to describe is only the latest in an impressively long line of autistic generations, reaching far back into humanity’s ancient past. That autism has gone unrecognized for so long suggests exactly the opposite of what Baron-Cohen is trying to say—it suggests there has been nothing lost, or even wretched, about any of these prior generations. Far from being lost, the current generation of autistic adults is indeed the first to be found, found living quietly and productively among us, as autistic generations always have. But if Baron-Cohen and his colleagues must insist on hunting for those who are supposedly gone astray, might I suggest they expand their search beyond their clinic door. For out in nearly every street can be found a generation of autistic adults much larger than even Baron-Cohen has managed to conceive, a generation doing so well it would never think to bother with his self-deluded clinic.

As I have written elsewhere, autism has had a significant presence within the human population for a very long time—a presence mostly silent, but not without consequence.

What If the Flynn Effect Has Ended?

Some recent studies have suggested the Flynn effect might soon be ending (at least in the Scandinavian countries), and several authors, including Professor Flynn himself, have latched onto this possibility like it were a lifeline being tossed to a drowning man. Those who have regarded the Flynn effect as mostly a twentieth century phenomenon—an historical anomaly, as it were—are experiencing near palpable relief at this hint the anomaly might soon be going away. Such a disappearance would end their fright, would end their gnawing fear that mankind is indeed growing ruthlessly more intelligent in a damn near inexplicable way.

But some of us are not so easily frightened. Those who have contemplated the entire history of mankind—from its animal-like existence not that long ago, through the sudden sprouting of complex civilizations beginning around six thousand years ago, to the franticly paced modern efforts to transform nearly every square inch of this entire planet (and those who have seen the imprint of the Flynn effect throughout that blazing history)—for us, any suggestion the Flynn effect might soon be ending (and coincidentally just now, right at the very moment of its discovery)—well, how are we to choke back our reaction without offending those who have become so terribly frightened, for really such suggestions are little more than laughable.

To be sure, over the past fifty thousand years the Flynn effect has certainly gone through some surges and ebbs. To focus on Western Civilization alone, the era of Ancient Greece, along with its enduring aftermath, would undoubtedly have been one of those periods during which the Flynn effect ran at peak. Just one perusal through the physical constructions of that age—the buildings, the written mathematics, the crafted and portrayed arts—and one sees an embodiment of pattern and form running far beyond anything mankind had ever experienced before. That embodiment, suffused throughout the populace and down through the generations, showered its re-creating and foundational intelligence across the Roman era and well into the first millennium A.D. It was not until the stretch of the Dark and Middle Ages that we discern a slowing down of this ordered construction—and only then a slowing down of the Flynn effect—but not a complete halting, mind you, Western Civilization at 1500 A.D. still was more rapid and complex than Western Civilization at 500 A.D. And elsewhere of course—in Byzantium, India and China—we find yet more examples of the Flynn effect crescendoing into various bursts of sudden and local bloom.

Beginning with the Renaissance, the pace of this structural change embodied into the human environment resumed once more its rapid acceleration, and over the last five hundred years, and across all manner of civilization, man’s temporal, spatial, and non-biological abilities and patterned formulations have been increasing at a nearly mind-breaking speed. The I.Q. tests of the twentieth century have captured only the most recent period of this ongoing phenomenon; if there had been intelligence tests available in all the previous centuries, the Flynn effect could have been discovered long before now. Professor Flynn has not stumbled onto anything new. He has stumbled only onto the most recent residue of a process that has been profoundly reshaping the human landscape from the time of the great leap forward, and if the impressive Flynn effect statistics from the twentieth century are to be telling us anything at all, it is that from sheer momentum alone the Flynn effect can be expected to remain with us, and sustain us, for a considerable time to come.

But allow me to offer a moment’s respite to those who are so terribly frightened. Let us consider for speculation’s sake what might happen if indeed the Flynn effect has ended. What this implies of course is that in theory any one of us would be able to score as equally well on any future-offered intelligence test (say those being sat for two hundred years hence) as we might tally on any of the currently offered standardized forms. This feat, we realize in retrospect, would not have been possible for those poor souls who lived in the early nineteenth century. Try imagining a man from the early 1800s nabbed suddenly by the scruff of his neck, hustled forward a couple hundred years or so, whisked by plane, taxi and elevator to a brightly lit, sharply cornered examination room, placed before a typed-out pamphlet of the strangest looking shapes and most oddly worded phrases—pen and stopwatch waiting impatiently there on the table beside him. What answers do we anticipate from such a man? What brilliance might we soon be expecting to hear, beyond, that is, his repeated stammering, “But dear sir, what exactly do you propose I do?”

Respite over. For honestly, how can we believe, frightened or not, that we ourselves would escape a similar fate? Try imagining yourself now, suddenly bolted forward towards the twenty-third century, hastened to an examination hall by powered means you cannot begin to describe, then suddenly strapped to a contraption of all manner of knobs and wires and switches (at least, those are the only words you can think of to describe such an oddly constructed panel), and now with flashes of three-dimensional light dancing all about you, with rapid questions poured upon you in a grammar you have never considered before, and all the while accompanied by frantic demands to respond with a quick jab of finger, a flicker of eyelid once or twice, or at least a simple grunt or two. And just about the time you manage to catch your breath, just about the time you gather enough wits to offer at least one feeble attempt, the lights of the examination hall suddenly darken, the rapid stream of questions comes to a jarring halt, and from out of the walls a stentorian, twenty-third century form of a tut-tut voice announces that your time is over and that your score has failed to register, at least on any significant range. Some intellect you turned out to be.

If the Flynn effect has ended, then so has the course of human progress. To embrace this absurdity would be to misperceive what the Flynn effect has been trying to tell us; it would be to misconceive the question, what is intelligence? There are no paradoxes to be explained away from increasing intelligence scores; there is only a befuddlement from brain science dogmas that have been turning our inquiries outside in. The Flynn effect compels us to remove intelligence from out our head and place it in surroundings where it more rightly belongs, in the structured landscapes we humans have been building all around us, and will continue to build for a considerable time to come. A world increasingly more spatial, more temporal; an environment always more patterned, more frenzied—and what wonder can there be that we require newer generations to absorb each change afresh, and leave all the ancestors behind?

The Flynn effect has been shadowing the path of our human journey; it has been marking the pace of our considerable advancement, the one taking us all the way from savannah-bound primate to questing knight of a massive universe. Intelligence is not to be found in packets of scores alone: cast an eye wider, cast an eye across the twentieth century’s entire vista—from horse-drawn buggy to rocket in sky, from ground-hugging hovels to skyscrapers knifing air, from shovels and guns and axes to computers and networks and drones. Cast an eye across that entire scene, then say with conviction that the show is about to end. The sudden halt would jolt us right out of our skin; the end of the Flynn effect could only mean the death knell of all mankind. Allow me to save my fright for that possibility alone—for humanity’s darkest age indeed.

The Telltale Origin of Time and Space

Recognition of non-biological pattern and symmetry is the basis of our notions of time and space, and this recognition is not biologically natural. Its first appearance on this planet occurred mere centuries ago, and there is no indication of such recognition in the cognition and behaviors of the other animal species, or in the cognition and behaviors of early humans.

Thus the word normalcy does not attach to temporal and spatial recognition. To witness a spontaneous, biological occurrence of such recognition, we would need to look more carefully at the cognition and behaviors of those children we have ironically labeled as disordered.

Six Thousand Years Old

If we are speaking of the age of the world as mankind currently perceives it—with all our science and mathematics and literature and art and engineering and astronomy and so on—then the creationists are certainly being far more accurate in their dating techniques than the evolutionists are. Six thousand years ago, this species had made considerable progress stepping in off the hunter-gatherer’s grassy plain, but still lived much nearer to that plain than to the current forms of modern civilization. In Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in India, in China, dazzling flowers were on the verge of bloom, transformations our scientists still have not characterized accurately, the transformations having overwhelmed our scientists’ means. To say that the world was created almost miraculously starting around six thousand years ago would not be pressing credulity any appreciable degree—not if we are regarding that world through the gaze of our own eyes.

If the scientists can take any consolation from their miscalculation, it is that only they recognize flowers must have a context in which to bloom: to deny the steadfast background of the soil is no better than to suppress wonderment at the germination of the seed. The mistake of the creationists has been to ignore the very real context upon which this planet’s miraculous transformation took place, and the mistake of the scientists has been to remain dogmatically blind to the fact an anti-evolutionary transformation occurred at all.

The Common Wisdom

The theme binding these posts together is an unrelenting scrutiny of autism’s common wisdom.

You might think autism does not have a common wisdom, given the multitude of causation theories: genetic defects, brain abnormalities, environmental toxins, refrigerator mothers, vaccines, various combinations of all the above. You might think autism does not have a common wisdom, given the plethora of treatments: applied behavioral analysis, litanies of drugs, endless varieties of therapy, sensory integrations, biomedical concoctions, eugenics. You might think autism does not have a common wisdom, seeing as how we are as in the dark today as we were at the moment of autism’s discovery.

But autism does have a common wisdom. There is one assumption, one unquestioned belief underlying all these diverse theories and treatments, all this lack of progress. The one certitude so widely held is that autism is an indication of something gone medically wrong—an illness, a defect, a disorder, a blight mankind would be much better off without. That is the first step that altogether escapes notice. That is the initial turn in the wrong direction, the one leading right over the edge of a cliff.

In each entry here, you will find yet another attempt to shine light on that common wisdom—probing, exposing, holding the assumption up to the scrutiny of actual vision, holding the assumption up to the current status of our own humanity. With autism, we have talked ourselves into a pseudo-illness, and what a shame that must be for all, and what a lost opportunity for self understanding; for under the spell of common wisdom, we have failed to recognize how the current status of our own humanity has been built upon the back of that pseudo-illness.

I will be saying this again and again: autism’s common wisdom has been blind from its very beginning, and we will gain no understanding of this condition—and no understanding of ourselves—until we step back from the darkness of that abyss.

Language and Biological Immediacy

Language is the use of a biologically immediate artifact to represent something that is not biologically immediate.

All organisms, including humans, exist only within biological immediacy. That which is removed in space, that which is remote in the past or future, that which is not graspable through innate biological capacity—such events cannot be directly engaged or experienced by any organism. Every sensation, every urge, every action must transpire in the biological here and now, and there is no alternative—that is the essence of biological experience. And indeed, until quite recently on this planet, that has been the limit of biological experience.

Although an organism has no means to step outside of its biological immediacy, humans have demonstrated that organisms can use the material of biological immediacy to represent something else, to represent that which is not biologically immediate. It is in this way that language serves as a bridge to previously unknown and always unreachable realms: using language, an organism remains within the required confines of its biological immediacy while using something inside that biological immediacy—the material of language—to represent something beyond its biological immediacy.

The material of language can be almost anything—humans began with abstract gestures and vocalizations, and have recently adopted materials that can be touched and more widely seen or heard. What is transformational and important about language is not the material itself but the elements and structure being represented—events of time, space and other non-biological conceptualizations. Although an organism can never directly engage such elements, it can use its belief in the value and accuracy of the language representing such elements to change the course of its own biological immediacy. And thus it is that humans have in large part separated themselves from their evolutionary animal past.

If one wants to understand the origins and structure of language, one does not focus on the material of language, since that material itself is almost completely arbitrary. (And one goes even further afield to focus on mentalizations or brain processes, since mentalizations are little more than the re-creation of the arbitrary materials of language.) If one wants to understand the origins and structure of language, one focuses instead on the non-biological elements being represented, and wonders about their sudden recognition and their peculiar form. After all, this planet passed more than four billion years without any species ever considering time, space or any other non-biologically immediate concept. And humans too, they passed hundreds of thousands of years completely oblivious to anything outside their biological immediacy.

Keep in mind: that which is far removed from biological immediacy is also far removed from normal biological perception.