There are, I believe, a few reasons to suppose that autism is a particularly fascinating area to be studying at the moment. What are those reasons? Firstly, prevalence rates of autism have soared in recent decades, from 1:2,500 in 1978 to around 1:100 today: a staggering 25-fold increase. Secondly, and simultaneously, the nature of those receiving a diagnosis of autism has changed considerably. To give just one example, in the 1980s no more than twenty percent of individuals diagnosed with autism had an I.Q. above 80. Today, by contrast, it is widely argued that “intellectual disability is not part of the broader autism phenotype… [and] the association between extreme autistic traits and intellectual disability is only modest” (Hoekstra et al. 2009: 534). Whatever you make of I.Q. scores, this changing profile means that it is reasonable to assume that when you meet somebody with autism today they are quite unlikely to be similar to someone you would’ve met with the same diagnosis just thirty years ago. Thirdly, as the number of people diagnosed with autism has increased, and as the capabilities of those individuals has increased, a (self-)advocacy network of enormous importance and influence has arisen, perhaps on a scale hitherto unseen. When woven together, these dynamic elements have led Ian Hacking to claim that, in autism, “we are participating in a living experiment in concept formation of a sort that does not come more than once in a dozen lifetimes” (Hacking 2009: 506). This, I think, is quite exciting.
Gregory Hollin, “Autism, sociality, and human nature”, Somatosphere, 2014-06-18.
June 23, 2014
QotD: Modern Autism
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