Thesis regarding Autism

Autism existed in 1960 and they knew how to diagnose it, nonetheless it was terribly rare; I don't picture writing off any sort of a 600% increase as better diagnosing.

Likewise although there may be a genetic component to the thing, the same Haldane dilemma I've mentioned in evolution threads absolutely forbids believing that a genetic change could be spread around rapidly enough to bring about a 600% increase, and I mean forbids that over the next several millenia, much less the past 40 years.

Air and water in America have been getting substantially cleaner since the 1970s; blaming pollution for the problem doesn't seem reasonable.

Likewise, vaccinations appear to have been ruled out as a cause by good science.

My GUESS is that somebody needs to look into the following possibility:

That some percentage of people are gentically pre-disposed to the business but, that from the days of Alley Oop up to around 1970 - 1980 or so, it usually didn't happen.

The really big change in our environment from around 1980 to the present has been going from an electrical world to an electronic world. As late as 1980 or thereabouts: most people did not have computers in their homes; most cars still had carburators and coil/breaker-point ignitions; most wristwatches were still wound by hand; most clocks were still electrical and not electronic; most homes had no more than one television set...

Obviously we're not going back to the pre-electronic world. But somebody should look into the idea of a possible connection here.