“nerds mating syndrome.”
That may be very real. Remember, economists have a no better than chance success at predicting the future, but are excellent at knowing the real reason why something did happen.
Autism came on strongly when women started attending graduate school. Before then, women would graduate from undergraduate programs in more general disciplines, such as ‘history’ or ‘English’. They would then marry men with more STEM degrees.
There was no better than a chance possibility of a man who majored in a ‘hard science’, marring a woman in the same field, and since there were so few women in the ‘hard as opposed to ‘soft’ disciplines, such marriages were rare.
Then, as the graduate schools opened up to women, couples who were both studying high levels of Chemistry, Law, Math or some other hard science, to the exclusion of other subjects, would date each other, marry and have children.
They are then producing children, such as the Rain Man, who are spectacularly skilled in one area, but bereft in all others, i.e. Autism
Two lawyer friends have 3 Autistic children. A couple who both have masters in math have two such children as well.
There may be something very real to this “nerds mating syndrome.”
WIRED magazine has run a series of articles on geeks & nerds having autistic kids
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wired+magazine+autism&t=osx&ia=web
Maybe.
It may be the case that extremely high IQ people have variants of genes that also affect behavior (like autism). So the high IQ people might have a fortuitous mixture of certain gene variants, and their children could have a sub-optimal mix of the same gene variants.
As an example, if certain genes that affect the nervous system in a normal population are AABbccDdEE, and a super intelligent person has the genes AabbCCddEe, another person could have aabbCcddEe and be autistic. This would all occur because of the way genes interact with each other.
Not sure if I'm communicating the idea I want to express very well at all here...