[John H K]

Well, I'm sure it ended up being controversial in the autism parent community, but I read an interesting long article in "Wired" about Autism.

Turns out the rates of it in children are astronomically high in Silicon Valley. Point of the article is that there isn't a "bright line" between autistic and not autistic; it's a spectrum, and there are a lot of extremely intelligent, introverted people who are completely functional, but a bit odd.....that spectrum then fades into full-blown autism. I attended MIT (for a couple years before I, er, chose another school :-) and I can certainly attest to that.

Silicon Valley has one of the largest concentrations of these borderline people....who also tend to be astronomically well-paid computer designers and programmers....and society has changed to make such people far more likely to meet and marry each other and have children.

[sonserae]

My ex-husband was one of these odd, engineer types. We had a celebate marriage for 7 years because he was so introverted he stayed in the basement. He's been diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. If you read the symptoms, they are parallel to that of an autistic child....unemotional, detached from feelings, living in another world, introverted and anti-social, etc...