Sad truth

humans have created a society and environment where it is better to lose all attachment and emotion?

just my guess. go tow ork, behave, act this way, wear these clothes, get a car, pay bills, act friendly at work, submit to authority no matter how ludicris..

get the picture? so people lose the will to participate.

we are breeding ourselves to be mindless drones.

A nation of sheep

The info on that link was a sensationalistic bunch of a crap. There is no noticeable decrease in intelligence on the far ends of the bell curve.

Not trying to act as devil's advocate, but some feel the incidence may be increasing due to better medical diagnosis and awareness of the illness. 20 years
ago the ability to identify and diagnose autism (and the spectrum of maladies related to autism) was far less understood or clear-cut.

FWIW, my personal belief is that our environment could cause such an increase -- increased pollution levels, various exposures to chemicals (thimersol), dietary problems, and vaccinations and innoculations to the baby or mother pre-birth.

I don't buy the vaccine thing but one of the more interesting recent things I've seen on this was that increased television viewing seems to actually have a correlation with increased incidence of autism.

Generally though I agree that the single biggest factor is increased diagnosis of autism based on behaviors that have existed for a long time.

Wait, I don't think I have that right. I'm remembering something about rainfall, which then led to wondering about whether increased rainfall = increased TV viewing, but that wasn't the main point:

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20081026180227data_trunc_sys.shtml

Except that an increase in autism diagnosis does not explain the incidence of childern with autism before TV viewing age.

Well, that's not what I was saying, nor what I was attributing to the study.

oops..I misworded that. I meant that increased tv watching can't explain increases in autism for pre-tv-watching-aged children.

Ah, I see.

What age do you think is pre-tv-watching age, though?

(Again, I didn't remember the TV element quite right -- rainfall was the main thing, TV was speculated to be an element of that.)

I envision that as those who are less than 3. Would you agree there? They do seem to show increased autism diagnoses under age 3.

Not really... TV-watching just keeps getting younger. There is the whole Baby Einstein thing, of course, and Teletubbies, and the Disney channel has a passel o' new stuff out for very small children, and and and...

There's a bit in today's news about increased incidence of autism for babies of mothers who took (an) epilepsy drug while pregnant. http://www.webmd.com/epilepsy/news/20081201/epilepsy-drug-pregnancy-up-autism-risk

Obviously not the whole cause, but interesting.

Run, run!!! The sky is falling!

I think there are people who actively seek out stuff to be alarmist about.

Like you, ragman, from all I've read I see absolutely no evidence of a drop in average intelligence scores at either end of the bell-curve. Autism, however, may be a different matter. As I tend to be anything but an alarmist (been accused of the exact opposite, in fact, not seeing obvious danger etc.), I quite agree that the most probable reason for an apparent increase in the number of children being diagnosed as autistic is simply better diagnostic measures.

But autism and intelligence don't correlate very well. We've all heard of what used to be called 'idiot savants,' a condition of people we now characterize as 'autistic savants.' If new statistical data were to show that the distribution of IQ scores is, indeed, showing a decline in native intelligence, that would say nothing whatever about autism.

Not so many years ago autism was lumped together with a whole host of other unrelated neurological maladies and patients were simply locked away in psychiatric wards. Thank goodness, we've come a long way since then. With the proper support, most autistic people can learn to function quite well within a structured social framework. And there really ain't that many of them.

Could it be that since mercury is a constituent of air pollution, it (mercury) could be introduced to our food and water supply via rainwater .... remember acid rain?