Ali G's cousin on Autism and Sex Differences

Simon Baron-Cohen is a Cambridge scientist who studies autism, and, yes, he's the cousin of Sacha Baron, Cohen the comedian who plays Ali G. Here he advances his theory that autism might be caused by assortative marriage between nerdy men and nerdy women who both have "systematizing" minds, as opposed to the typical "empathizing" feminine mind which is interested in understanding individual relationships rather than general rules.

Of course, he's getting resistance from feminists who would rather that people went on suffering from autism than challenge their ideological orthodoxy about differences between men and women stemming solely from social conditioning.

Also included are responses from worthies such as Steve Pinker and Armand Marie Leroi.

Interestingly, Baron-Cohen points to differential exposure to male hormones in the womb. He should look into Ray Blanchard's research into the same subject. Blanchard has shown that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be homosexual. Blanchard speculates that this is caused by reactions between the mother's body and the hormones of the male fetuses that builds up with each gestation of a male. It would be very useful to see where autistics, who tend to be male, tend to fall in the birth order.

One important complication in Baron-Cohen's theory that I've been bringing up for seven years and Carole Hooven echoes is that there are two kinds of masculinity: Big Men and Nerds. Hooven writes:

A big-picture, evolutionary analysis of the Assortative Mating theory reveals somewhat of a paradox between conventional notions of masculinity, and the newer notions of "cognitive masculinity." Testosterone can be thought of as promoting behaviors that are traditionally masculine, preparing males physically and psychologically to bias energetic investment toward mating effort. In adult males, high testosterone levels are associated with status-seeking behaviors and the pursuit of mating opportunities. In men, confidence and social dominance (which would require a relatively high social facility) are predicted by high testosterone. The case of the classic nerdy scientist conjures up images of the stereotype of the low testosterone, but in the current context "cognitively masculine," man — a scrawny male who, although he may be successful in the world of technology, is a miserable failure socially and romantically.

The paradox of the two notions of masculinity raises questions about the role of testosterone in shaping psychological traits, such as status-seeking behavior and spatial ability, in utero and in adulthood. With my colleagues Chris Chabris, Peter Ellison and Steve Kosslyn, I've investigated the role of testosterone in solving spatial problems. We have found that although high testosterone males outperformed low-testosterone males on mental rotation tests, the high performers gained their advantage not because they were better at internally transforming objects, but, as the evidence suggested, because they were more confident in their decisions about the similarity of objects. Perhaps the paradox can be at least partially resolved by furthering our understanding of testosterone's role in affecting performance on cognitive tests.

These findings on individual differences in mental rotation performance, along with a relative lack of robust findings on the effects of perinatal testosterone, remind us that picture of how testosterone affects cognition is still far from complete.

Finally, I don't know why nobody ever talks about the possibility that autism could be caused by an infection. If the disease is truly growing rapidly in number of victims (which seems likely, although I'm not convinced), the most likely cause would be the introduction into America of a germ of foreign origin, just like AIDS wasn't caused by some sudden genetic shift, but by the arrival of an African germ.

People point to the supposed high number of autistic children in Silicon Valley as evidence for the assortative mating theory, but Silicon Valley is unusual in a number of ways, including its higher number of immigrants from Asia.

Autism is such a terrible disease that we need to look at all the possibilities and not rule out unpleasant ones just because we might find the truth disturbing.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer