I’m curious as to the seeming rise of autistic humans in the last decades.
Is it that it was just not understood and therefore not diagnosed/reported?
Are there environmental or even societal factors that have corresponded to this increase in cases?
In: Biology
An important aspect of understanding of neurodivergent behaviour is that it is maladaptive to the given environment. One can easily imagine how autistic trades can be advantageous is certain environments. For example, autism in a farmer living in a small, mono-culture community regulated by codified order, another words one of Mechanical Solidarity, would be well adapted and can be very positive. Thus, up until recently in human history, most of us simply didn’t live in environments that saw these behaviours as maladaptive.
Secondly, we have just begun to seriously seek and diagnose autism and its spectrum. The better we get at it, the higher the numbers will go until we reach the true population numbers. Then the rates will probably plateau given that it is most likely a genetic and not an environmental condition.
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