Chaos Magnet

Is intelligence sustainable?

My nephew, Jake, is four years old, and he's so smart that the pediatrician can't even measure his intelligence because the scale only goes up to age seven. He lives 1000 miles away from me, but I met him for the first time a couple of years ago during the big Northeast blackout, when I got stranded in New York. He was really sweet, and I could see from his personality a lot of why people said he was just like me at that age. Given his obvious intelligence -- he was spelling multisyllabic words at two -- I took it as a compliment.

Today I had lunch with my mother, who informed me that Jake has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.

Jake's fortunate, though. Apparently, the doctor said, he has all of the "good" qualities that come with that diagnosis, and none of the "bad" ones. Unsure of what that meant, I went off in search of information on Asperger's. [Update: what it actually meant is that my mother mis-interpreted what my sister said. Jake was tested for Asperger's, but because he only scored high on the cognitive portion -- he is, as I said, extraordinarily intelligent -- and not on the negative areas, such as interpersonal relationships, he is offically NOT diagnosed with Asperger's. But the rest of this post still stands.]

I'm a little shaken by what I've found.

If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably already know this, but apparently there has been a huge spike in the number of children diagnosed with autism, especially in areas with high concentrations of, well, geeks. Why? Well, an article in Wired, The Geek Syndrome, points to a potential reason.

Let's put it this way. If you're a programmer or an engineer and you work with a large number of other programmers or engineers, you know someone with autism. Period. They may not even know it. It might even be you.

But apparently those "good" qualities the pediatrician was talking about are closely related to the creativity and focus that make us good at what we do. A few of the necessary genes, apparently, is a Good Thing.

Too many, though, is a Bad Thing.

Thing is, where people who are borderline autistic, or who have Asperger's, used to gravitate towards professions (and attitudes) in which they were unlikely to reproduce (such as monks and "strange old aunts"), they are now becoming programmers and engineers and starting to wind up in the same profession, where they meet each other, get married, and ... well ... produce children.

It's been a running joke for some time that autism runs rampant in the tech industry. As the Wired article points out, Bill Gates is regularly rumored to have it. Think I'm overestimating? There's a screening test, the Autism Quotient (AQ) linked from the article. Pass the URL around your office and see what you come up with.

I don't even want to tell you what my score was.

So here's my question: if the genes that give us the ability to succeed and change the world ultimately cause problems when they become too concentrated, could it lead to a breakdown in society? Autism rates are rising around the world. Are we just a generation or two from an intellectual armageddon?

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Technorati tags: autism, intelligence, evolution

Technorati tags: autism | Asperger's |

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