From: Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 18 Mar 2004 - 13:53:25 GMT
> Note though that the model is made of stuff from your own head,
> that you have experienced -- a little boy from Britain would have a hard
> time 'feeling the pain of' (say) a little boy that survived the Rwandan
> massacres.
And conversely, that people who have only seen extreme emotion will
react to the most trivial things in an extreme way, cos that's all the
'stuff' they have to build behaviours with.
----------------------------------------------
> So the diagnostic criteria which include violence may be misleading.
I think there's a genetic component - no known effective therapy - the
only thing that these kids seem to learn is to keep their behavior
"below the radar". Don't know what advantage it might confer in the
population unless it is like sickle-cell anemia - a recessive trait that
confers some advantage when paired with a dominant gene, but which can
be dangerous when it is paired with another recessive.
Doesn't have to have an advantage -- may just be not detrimental enough,
given fairly lax selection such as operates in humans. There is a nice
extension to theories about neutral evolution that makes it workable in
the real world (unlike, sadly, much of popgen) -- nearly/effectively
neutral. That is, it is neutral, given the resolving power of selection
in that context. Presumably many of these autist-like states have some
flaw in the fundamental machinery. Also, some genes that are extremely
detrimental (CF for example) do survive despite often killing before
reproductive age because recessives are almost impossible to completely
eliminate from the population -- it takes (almost literally) forever
unless you kill large portions of the population.
My campaign at the moment is to re-redefine survival of the fittest back
to what i think was intended -- that it is survival of the fittest
_cohort_ (= survival of the 'fit enough').
Half the day on the list. God I need to do some work...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
MIAPE Project -- psidev.sf.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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