Today the Lion of the Blogosphere published a fascinating post about nerdiness and autism (including aspergers) that I wanted to comment on. He writes:
I am rejecting an idea I previously had, and which seems common on the internet, that nerdiness is a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome, or that all nerds have that syndrome. The reason why there is a lot of overlap between nerds and Aspies is because they are both social outcasts, and as social outcasts they both fail to learn the correct behaviors of the popular kids, but the reasons for why they become social outcasts differ.
I agree that nerdiness is not a mild form aspergers (which itself is sometimes described as a mild form of autism). Nerds for example have high IQ’s. If nerdiness were a mild form of aspergers, then we should expect people with aspergers to have even higher IQ’s, and autistic people to have even higher IQ’s still. Instead, the opposite appears to be the case.
However I think the Lion’s wrong to conclude that the similarities between nerds and autistic/asperger types are only superficial. The fact that nerds are more likely to have autistic relatives shows that there’s a genetic relationship.One possibility is that aspergers people are just nerds with mild executive dysfunction, and autistic people are just nerds with moderate to severe executive dysfunction.
But what is a nerd? In my opinion, a nerd is just a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) oriented mind and personality. As I previously opined, in the last 200,000 years, there’s been an evolutionary trade-off: social-sexual traits have been replaced by technological traits. As the ice age emerged and we moved North, we’ve been evolving from the sexually active spirtiual artists with people smarts (i.e. charismatic religious and cult leaders), to stable, focused scientific virgins with machine smarts. However, because humans have lived in warm climates for so long, the topical traits are still highly prevalent. When someone with a more tropical personality suffers from executive dysfunction, it probably manifests as schizophrenia, not autism. This could be why scientists are confused about whether autism and schizophrenia are genetically similar, or genetic opposites. Both are the same disability (executive dysfunction) but in people with opposite emotional and cognitive profiles, causing very different symptoms.
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in my encyclopedia from the early 80s the entry on autism says it is a rare developmental disorder having an incidence of 1 in 5000.
all of the excess diagnoses since Rainman should be viewed with great suspicion.
psychiatry and counseling are businesses first. and unlike the rest of medicine there are no tests. there are only clusters of symptoms. and specialists often disagree on what the “right” diagnosis is.
a nerd is anyone who has a very narrow range of interests. bobby fischer is reputed to have asked, “what does that have to do with chess?” a nerd is someone who is very passionate about one thing. it needn’t be in stem. warren buffet is an investments nerd.
But the cluster of traits we define as autism are probably just extremes of normal variation so where we draw the line is wholly arbitrary, but that doesn’t make the category any less meaningful. For example, an encyclopedia might define a giant as anyone over 8 feet so the “condition” is extremely rare, or one might define a giant as anyone over 5’10”, so more than half of all men qualify, but either way, there are objective differences between giants and non-giants that need to be understood.
Perhaps I was too narrow in suggesting that only STEM interests are nerdy, but I do think nerdy interests tend to be logical, rational, and systematic. For example if someone was obsessed with religion, politics or sex, people might call them a fanatic, ideologue or pervert, but probably not a nerd.
i found this, http://www.chess.com/news/bill-gates-vs-magnus-carlsen-checkmate-in-12-seconds-8224.
in the end….in the “final analysis”…what matters for great/world-beating success is some not very high iq threshold + specialization and passion.
you’re right. warren buffet, or any non-stem obsessives, wouldn’t very often be described as nerds.
i think the term (in the us) is an inheritance of the british upper classes’ disdain for real work of any kind.
are probably just extremes of normal variation so where we draw the line is wholly arbitrary, but that doesn’t make the category any less meaningful.
but real physical illnesses are never a matter of extremes of a distribution. are they?
high blood pressure or type ii diabetes or morbid obesity are the only possible exceptions i can think of. but the putative illness is still only a risk factor for real illness rather than an illness in itself.
in the case of the worst mental illness, schizophrenia: one hears voices or he doesn’t.
there’s no continuum.
in the case of the worst mental illness, schizophrenia: one hears voices or he doesn’t.
there’s no continuum.
As I speculate in another post, I suspect autism and schizophrenia are both at the extreme low end of normal variation in Executive Functioning, but are at opposite extremes when it comes to nerdiness:
You can conceive of schizophrenia as a a binary distinction between hearing & not hearing voices, but you can turn any continuous variable into a simple dichotomy. Morbid obesity: you either break a chair when you sit on it, or you don’t.
Now there are real physiological dichotomies. Downs Syndrome: you either have an extra chromosome or you don’t. But the real disability in Downs Syndrome is not the extra chromosome, but the fact that the extra chromosome tends to put one at the extreme low ends of the IQ, height, and heart health continuums. Now had we never discovered the cause of Downs Syndrome, we might be diagnosing people who lacked the extra chromosome with Downs simply because they happened to score the same on such variables. It might be the same with autism/schizophrenia. There might be some dichotomous genetic mutation(s) that cause these conditions in some, while others lack these mutations, but just happen be at the extreme ends of normal genetic variation.
Jensen talked about the distinction between familial and organic intellectual disability. The siblings of an organic IQ 50 will have IQ’s of 100 (perfectly normal) because the organic low IQ was caused by a genetic fluke (i.e. extra chromosome) rather than than the normal sources of polygenetic variation. By contrast, the siblings of a familial IQ 50 will have IQ’s of 75, because they just happen to be at the extreme end of NORMAL genetic variation, so their siblings tend to be less extreme versions of themselves. Even though an IQ of 50 makes life extremely hard, regardless of the cause, the familial IQ 50 will be much less disadvantaged than the organic IQ 50, because the former is part of the biologically normal population.
One reason there are far more people with IQ’s below 50 than the Gaussian curve predicts, is that the normal curve can only predict normal variation. It can not predict organic low IQ which is qualitatively different.
The same happens with height. If a man is 6’8″ because of normal genetic variation, he’ll probably have a great life with lots of girlfriends and success at sports and leadership, but if a man is 6’8″ because of some fluke genetic disorder causing an overactive pituitary gland, he’ll have a much more challenging life.
Once we understand the causes of autism/schizophrenia, we might be able to distinguish between organic and familial forms of those conditions. In the past we probably only diagnosed the organic autistic people, so autism was considered extremely rare.
in the end….in the “final analysis”…what matters for great/world-beating success is some not very high iq threshold + specialization and passion
I don’t really like the term IQ threshold because it implies that IQ is important up to some level of IQ or some level of success, and beyond that point, IQ suddenly becomes irrelevant. It’s a popular idea, but in my humble opinion, it almost never works that way. While it’s true that IQ virtually never explains most of the variation in any culturally valued form of success, the relationship between IQ and success/achievement/performance is typically beautifully linear through virtually the full range of both IQ and accomplishment. See:
Actually there is a high correlation between High I.Q. and mental illness. Some people believe this means that High I.Q. may be somewhat unstable, however you have to have a basis in Psychology to see a different possibility. Mental Illness is not a hard quantifiable diagnosis, which should be obvious in the fact that entire diagnoses are revised and changed and there are at least two entirely different manuals used in the US and Europe. Considering that what is considered Mental Illness is simply deviation from societal norms you can see the obvious contradiction. It should seem obvious that people of higher intelligence would view the world far differently than say a moron. Therefore, its not implausible that they may also have unusual behaviors due to a different set of data. Therapists and Psychiatrists who treat patients are usually told at the outset before they see the patient that the patient is abnormal, and therefore is pressured into making a diagnosis based on this assumption. Autism is obvious at the most severe cases as Rain Man documents, but Aspergers is much less noticeable. A clinician reaching for a diagnosis will usually find one.
Sources?