Yet another study proves that pre-term birth doesn't cause autism
Oh goody, yet another study trying to pinpoint the “cause” of autism. I'm sure the autism community is just thrilled that more time, effort, and money is being funneled into this endless quest to blame autism on something. Pre-term birth? Nope, debunked. Vaccines? Myth. Refrigerator mothers? Laughable. Clearly the cure is just around the corner if researchers keep throwing darts at causes hoping something sticks!
But I guess actually supporting autistic folks who are already here is just too simplistic when there are so many exciting causal factors still left to rule out. Just imagine the breakthrough if we could find the elusive autism gene, erase it from existence, and “cure” people of their neurological differences! So what if the autism community has repeatedly said they don’t need or want to be cured - these poor researchers still have to earn a paycheck by proving themselves clever enough to pin down autism’s source.
Let’s divert even more scarce resources to this cohort of brilliant scientists trying to make breakthroughs irrelevant to the population they claim to want to help. They clearly won't rest until autism is “solved,” putting themselves out of a job and leaving behind the real people impacted by their work. What visionaries! But wouldn't it be wild if just some of those research dollars went to, oh I don't know, programs to support and empower autistic folks to live their best lives? Nah, too ridiculous - this is SCIENCE we're talking about!
Sarcasm aside …
The study’s lead author points to the complex, multifactorial nature of autism - yet some theories provide evolutionary explanations for why this wiring has endured. As I cover extensively in No Place for Autism?, Reser's “Solitary Forager hypothesis” suggests certain autistic traits were advantageous for our ancestor’s survival as lone hunters and gatherers. Furthermore, given Natural Selection, the persistence of autism in the human population indicates it has served some adaptive purpose over time. Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and intense interests would have lent unique skills to tribes where division of labor was key. So whilst modern research focuses myopically on identifying a singular cause or cure, the bigger-picture view reveals how neurodiversity has contributed to humanity’s endurance at various points. Perhaps if eugenics-oriented researchers approached autism through this paradigm - not as an aberrant condition to eliminate but an integral variation woven into our success as a species - the discourse around support and empowerment would shift dramatically.
Further illustrating the ethical murkiness of this research is its ties to the history of eugenics. Efforts to identify and eliminate genetic conditions smack of the flawed drive toward human “improvement” via selective reproduction. The autism cure crusade eerily emulates goals to filter out societal differences by strictly determining what comprises a “healthy” or “desired” human. And whilst today’s push relies more on correcting genes after birth, the mentality of classifying neurological variation as defective enough to demand correction still echoes aims for creating a standardised, “ideal” person through restriction of diversity.
Beyond ethical issues, the feasibility of genetically purging humanity of traits as complex and interwoven as autism seems scientifically dubious as well. Human attributes don’t exist in vacuums - attempt to pluck one thread from the intricate genetic loom shaping behaviour, cognition, perception, and you’re bound to unravel unintended consequences. Yet so persists the dangerous myth that we possess enough expertise about the human genome to consciously sculpt better versions of being in our image of normalcy. The fact is, we don’t have this control or prescience. But for scientists gripped with eugenic aspirations of an ordered, uniform populace, admitting lack of omnipotence just won’t do. So on they search for the ridding of autism and erasure of difference, regardless if such power imbalances are ethical, attainable, or wise.