Yours is the most correct assessment of the situation.
As the father of a profoundly Autistic 11 year old boy, I can assure everyone it is not lack of disipline or desire to extract money from the school district that made him that way.
However, years ago when I joined a couple of national Autism advocation organizations, the number affected was one in 500. I thought then that was a little high but I do remember discussions with other members regarding the amount of government research grants that went to AIDS, arguably a preventable condition, versus research dollars directed towards Autism, with much more mysterious causes and solutions.
Thus was born the incentive to inflate the numbers of affected in order to get a bigger piece of the research pie.
Those with an Engineering education make up less than 1% of the population of the US. This latest statistic would not only make every Engineer (I r 1) Autistic, but every mathamatician and scientist as well.
One could argue that such a statistical process would benefit my son. I argue the opposite. People may think my son will grow out of it or run a major software company someday because Autism has been classified so broadly. But the reality is he will be living at home with my wife and I until we ourselves are deceased.
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Blessings for you and for your son. He does have a tough road ahead but, as an obviously loving parent, his life will be made easier because of you.
It's interesting that you and others have mentioned engineers. My degrees are in chemistry and chemical engineering and everyone scientist and engineer I know could be classified as a bit "different" from, say, business majors.
All of my co-workers have extraordinary powers of concentration. My wife often has to call me and remind me to come home. I think that it's 4:00 PM, it's really 8:00 PM, and I haven't noticed that almost everyone -- except my fellow engineers -- have left. I would make a very good absent-minded professor.
I have loved rocking chairs since my earliest memories, and have set my chair at work so that I can rock, but only a small fraction of an inch. I just simply feel better when I rock.I'm the most social and outgoing person among my co-workers, but it's partly because I've learned to fake extroversion. I'm actually a slight introvert and get my batteries recharged by being alone. Many of my co-workers are classic introverts and about 15% are totally unable to interact with other people. They literally live in fantasy worlds. They're considered strange even by those of us who are used to dealing with strange people.
Do I have a very mild version of Asperger's syndrome? I don't know, and it really doesn't matter because my life is quite happy and normal. This quote from Wired magazine caught my attention though:
It's a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics - coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours - are residing somewhere in Asperger's domain. Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger's syndrome "the engineers' disorder." Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder. Dov's father told me that his friends in the Valley say many of their coworkers "could be diagnosed with ODD - they're odd." In Microserfs, novelist Douglas Coupland observes, "I think all tech people are slightly autistic."
Just some random thoughts:
Genetics seems to be increasingly implicated. I wonder how much epigenetics could be involved.
PubMed has 25366 citations on breast feeding, breast feeding and autism has 8 citations and breast feeding and autistic spectrum disorder got 12 citations.
Besides the noted benefits of breast feeding, could there be an another argument to bring back wet nurses?