This comment was posted on Daily Kos by the (Obviously admirable) parent of an autistic child. I thought it appropriate and well written enough to reproduce in its entirety below. — DS
“I have a teeny insight into that large faction of antivaxxers. (My biology degree, ironically, “immunized” me from believing their arguments, however.)
When someone sits you down and tells you that your child has this “terrible affliction,” you usually know almost nothing about it beyond a few Hollywood stereotypes. All you know is that your life, your entire world, has been flipped upside down. You can’t breathe. This must be a mistake, you think. I can’t do this. I don’t understand how this happened.
It is at that moment that you are faced with one of two paths: You can look for reasons to take the “blame” (off of you) and focus your energy on preventing this terrible event ever happening to anyone else. You might even immerse yourself in ways to “cure” autism, to save your child.
Or you can wonder briefly what caused it, and focus instead on how to maximize your child’s potential. You can investigate the condition itself and very quickly you discover that autism is not a death sentence and it’s not even a life sentence to misery. Most people with autism, you discover, are great people, living lives that are as rich and varied as everyone else. Once you understand the condition, you realize that lots of people you already know probably have autism and are functioning well in society. You can breathe again, knowing that your child’s path in life, while it will be more difficult than neurotypical kids,’ can (and usually does) lead to a happy ending.
My point is that a great many of the anti-vaxxers fall into the first group. It is so much easier to get stuck in a blame game and focus on preventing and “curing” autism. It is a lot harder to educate the people around you to accept your different child for who he is. It is a lot harder to advocate to the education system (and society, in general) to accomodate these kids’ differences.
And it is a lot harder to look back reflectively and understand that there might not be a reason that your child is autistic. It might just be the way the dice fell. Pure random chance. My training as a biologist was helpful to understand that life is full of so many contingent events. It also helps me understand that what we difine as “normal human” should be a much broader definition. Somewhere in our evolutionary past, the human characteristics that we currently lump under the label “autism” were useful to our survival as a species. If autism (and ADHD, by the way) was so terrible for our species, it would have been selected against and the genes or percursors that make a child susceptible to it would have died out.
As Darksyde points out above, “follow the money.” There are a lot of people building careers and raking in the $$ by convincing terrified parents that their child’s autism wasn’t their fault and that it should be cured. They have glommed onto vaccines because they are an easy and ubiquitous target.
pardon, is the entire post the quoted comment? It doesn’t have a close-quotes.
As an autistic, I find it interesting that most other autistic adults I meet are pro-vaccination, and deeply frustrated by the lies that are spread about how vaccines have ‘damaged’ us.
The other problem with the vaccination myth is that it allows autistics to be dismissed as damaged, instead of just a variation of the ‘normal’ human experience. And it highlights our attitudes towards disability, that the disabled are damaged, or broken, and cannot be complete human beings until their state is cured.
Admirable sentiments, but is there any proof that the genetic disposition for autisim or adhd was a boon to human survival in the past, or is that just wishful thinking. Natural selection doesn’t function perfectly to allow for only productive genes to persist; a lot of “junk” goes along for the ride.
I’m pretty sure parents of autistic kids like Temple Grandin (whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet and found brilliant) don’t much care for the junk science being thrown around by vaccine protesters.
Sadly, humans have managed to evolve right out of the natural selection process. All we can hope for, to preserve the sanctity of the gene-pool is that the truly stupid, and universally useless (anti-vax wack-o’s, fundie nut-jobs, Sarah Palin) manage to earn themselves a Darwin award. There are also huge chunks of the genetic code that we, as a society, still don’t fully comprehend. Autism we’ve managed to successfully attribute to genetics, but ADHD/ADD/etc… not so much. Could be behavioral, or environmental. It’s just not clear… or at least that’s what my 9 year old’s doctor spouted at me.
Evolution by natural selection does not constitute an unblemished trail of boonful events. It’s also understood to act over very long periods-geologic time. Autism may be incomprehensible because w’e only observed it for 70 years or so.
Someone with a biology degree should understand evolution better than I do, as a person with an MA in medieval studies. I don’t think there’s any evidence that hemophilia, for example, has any, or is concomitant with, any adaptive benefit.
What had3 said.
One probably should not assume that autism, ADHD, etc. are the result of a mutation at a single locus. They are more likely the result of a number of genes acting together and in concert with environmental factors and developmental contingencies in fetal and neonatal life. For instance, on the genetic factors, all the alleles of all the genes involved may be individually conducive to neurotypical behavior, but certain combinations may lead to atypical development. Or, certain combinations may be adversely effected by some environmental factor, Or…
People want simple answers, and there are not many of them.
The parent who writes here, quoted in the OP, is indeed admirable. I do have sympathy for parents of neuro-atypical children who are suckered into believing woo-laden (and expensive) lies – I know from my own experience how utterly devastating it is to find out that your child is going to face huge difficulties over and above the usual hurdles – but of course as this parent and you point out, the real bastards here are the woo-meisters peddling the so-called “cures”. I have no words to express how much I despise them.
I have no idea what the evolutionary origin, if any, for autism might be. There could be genes for example that offer some advantage under certain circumstance that, when present in certain combos, are detrimental to an individual. There could be genes that once held adaptive advantage, lost their function as that environemental feature subsided, and mutated. There could be some advantage to a family group in having some degree of intellectual diversity and autism could be the extreme end of it along with other thigns liek bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. It could be a complete genetic or developmental misfire, we all have em to some degree.
I always liked the pure sci-fi version, what Peter Watts wrote about in Blindsight, where autism was a vestigial trait left by a closely related subspecies of really smart and really deadly hominids who hunted other hominids of their era and were the source of the vampire and other monster legends. But it’s probably not that.