Baron-Cohen’s Assortive Mating vs Bowery’s Indian Immigration Hypothesis of Autism

Posted by James Bowery on Monday, 30 January 2006 18:58.

An hypothesis by a guy named “Baron-Cohen” of autism’s etiology has been getting a lot of press recently.  He blames the increase in autism diagnoses on an increase in assortive mating among people with analytic minds—aka “nerds”.  Recently, the most read techie website on the net, Slashdot (calling itself, “News for Nerds”) carried an article which trumpted Baron-Cohen’s research.  My response is that not only are nerds not reproducing enough to create an explosion of anything but that the data provided by Baron-Cohen is virtually non-existent and is weaker than the data supporting the hypothesis that immigrants from India are causing the explosion of autism.

Baron-Cohen’s evidence for assortive mating being the cause of autism is actually weaker than is the evidence for immigration from India being the cause of autism.

Baron-Cohen’s evidence is called “ecological correlation”.  As another poster to the Slashdot article pointed out , ecological correlations are subject to the “ecological fallacy”.  However, ecological correlations are a good way to do preliminary investigations into unknown sources of new pathologies.  As anyone who has had to dignose a complex system knows, you start by gathering gross phenomenology about the system which is rather inexpensive, and then start teasing apart the various potential confounding variables as you find promising (but possibly deceptive) lines of research validated by the preliminary data.

We’re at such a primitive state of understanding of the phenomenon of autism that there is intense disagreement as to whether there has actually been an explosive epidemic in autism over the last 20 years or whether there is simply an explosion in the number of social workers who are prone to make the diagnosis given the same kinds of problems they’ve always faced.

Without getting into the nuances of this debate we can simply say this:

If we behave as though there is a real explosion in the number of cases, we are acting wisely since the cost of being wrong is far less than is the cost of being wrong about there being no explosive epidemic.

Having said that, we have the first reason to discount Baron-Cohen’s research:

Baron-Cohen provides no data to back up the plausible sounding argument for why there might have been increased assortive mating among “nerds”. Byrna Siegel makes the same argument.  There are just as plausible arguments that assortive mating among “nerds” has decreased over the same time period—not the least of which is the simple fact that nerds are working in male saturated environments where availability of mates is low, the cost of living is high and job stability is low.  In other words, nerds are reproducing at a much lower aggregate rate than they used to, when they were living in more scattered, more gender balanced, more affordable and more inbred rural towns.

The second reason to discount Baron-Cohen’s research is that he doesn’t use the technique of “strong inference” which you really have to do when you’re dealing with such a tenuously supported preliminary investigation.  Strong inference means taking at least 2, preferably more, hypotheses and subjecting them to similar tests to see which of them wins in a rational comparison.  There are lots of suspected ecological correlations out there—mercury to autism, vaccination to autism, etc. and he doesn’t compare the degree of his ecological correlation to the degree of these other ecological correlations.  Note that what I’m not saying here that the ecological fallacy isn’t in play here, nor am I saying that there might be better data supporting or refuting a given hypothesis (say, statistical case studies of individuals).  What I am saying is that if you’re going to use strong inference you need to apply similar tests to the different hypotheses and see which of them comes out on top so you can prioritize your subsequent research rationally.

The third reason to discount Baron-Cohen’s research is that he doesn’t even provide hard numbers for the nerd-autism ecological correlation (this is giving him the benefit of the doubt that nerds aren’t having their effective fertility destroyed by other ecological factors).

So what would happen if you tried to do a real, strong inference ecological study of autism comparing the various hypotheses against each to see which has the strongest ecological correlation?

You’d come to the conclusion that the place to look for the cause of autism’s explosive increase over the last 20 years is in areas of high Finnish ancestry where something is imported along with Indian immigrants—quite probably along with lower caste immigrants working in Indian restaurants.

This is because a) there is a plausible argument that autism involves an intestinal pathology that may well be transmissible b) that something has been increasing exponentially to cause an exponential growth of autism and immigration from India fills that bill, c) that only a small portion of the population is susceptible to this pathology over a small portion of their early childhood and d) people with Finnish ancestry are disproportionately represented in many of the areas where Indians have arrived recently and e) if you look at thousands of two-variable combinations of ecological variables aggregated at the State level, the one with the highest correlation coefficient with the Department of Education’s State-by-State autism rate in the year 2000 is Finnish Americans per capita times immigrants from India per capita, Pearson correlation coefficient, r=.60 with a probability of it being due to chance, p less than.001.  You use multiplication (times) to get the conjunction of the two demographies (susceptible and vector demographies).

So if Baron-Cohen’s ecological correlation (nerds-marrying-nerds) can be supported at at least the level of genuine data at a State level ecology, we can do a rational comparison.

To cap off this installment in my 4 year long campaign to see more appropriate investment in this hypothesis, within days prior to this essay, some researchers in Utah, studying a relatively inbred Utah family with a high rate of autism, have localized the probable cause of susceptibility to autism on chromosome 3.  Their research is the first to replicate prior research showing such a strong linkage between autism and a particular chromosomal site.

That prior, replicated and confirmed, research, was done in Finland.

It is fascinating that over the course of 4 years that I have been attempting to get people to pay attention to the hypothesis that Finnish ancestry has a particular susceptibility to autism that my page on the ecological correlation with Finnish ancestry was the highest ranked page on Google searches for “cause of autism” for 2 of those years.  I’ve had to take down that web site, Laboratory of the States, due to lack of funding.  This will, I am sure, be gratifying to Baron John Jay Ray, MR’s resident Dravdiaphile who responded to my first posting here at MR about the Finn*Indian vs Autism correlation by saying “ecological correlations are invalid”.  But his friends from India will be more gratified.

Tags: Health



Comments:


1

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:17 | #

Professor Baron-Cohen argues that systemizers are often attracted to each other - and thus more likely to pass ‘autism’ genes to their offspring.

From the BBC News article linked by Slashdot.

In my experience, nerdy men attract worthy but dull and uninteresting wives.  Not for one moment would I call them “systemizers” or even very intelligent.  (A ghastly Americanism anyway. What is the BBC coming to?).

Anyhow, should they actually find one another some enchanted evening I cannot see why two “nerds” should produce a higher than average incidence of autistic children.  The Prof simple assumes that, on average, each parent will be more likely than non-nerds to contribute the required genes for the narrow-focussing intelligence of technoworld?  Whatever happened to regression to the mean?  And in truth, real-world parents quickly learn that their children are markedly and rather wonderfully individual, with few inate predispositions from either parent.

Of course, I can only parley in broad-brush, non-nerdy art-speak.  Is there, in fact, evidence of those analytically-geared, scientific brains running in families?  Theatrical families exist, but that isn’t claimed to be a genetic transmission.  Musical families exist, but in the words of perhaps the leading musical educationalist in London, “Anyone can pass Grade 8.”

I don’t know about Baron thing, but the Slashdotters on the thread seem to be rather keen to conflate genetics and the all-too-Blank-Slate proposition that non-verbally skilled nerd offspring will encounter a paucity of good jokes.

Apparently, instead of the jokes you get arrogance.  Maybe that’s the Baron’s missing link to autism.


2

Posted by Mark Richardson on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:13 | #

I agree with Ben.

James makes some interesting and reasonable criticisms of Baron-Cohen’s theory.

Even so, I am impressed that Baron-Cohen is willing to directly challenge liberal orthodoxy in pursuing his theory. He certainly offers the scientific world some clarity when he discusses the reasons for his research being considered politically incorrect.


3

Posted by John S Bolton on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 08:59 | #

Do immigrants from India still have the highest correlation, rather than those from the Philippines, when paired with your proxy susceptible population? If Filipinos were highest, considering their high rate of being in an ideal vector position relative to infectious agents, this might lead to nomination of pathogens. Some populations who were most recently hunter gatherers have genetic deficiency of delayed type hypersenstivity. If this were the cause of susceptibility, that would suggest possible pathogens of ubiquitous colonization, but locally variable virulence. Eg: candida, staph, pneomucystis carinii, etc. Vectorization through immigration can find and select the more virulent strains, and enhance their virulence furhter through passaging in hospital settings. A violation of the rule, that we must not allow transmission from the sicker to the healthier, can do this; and reliance on inferior medical staff, utilizing loopholes in minimum standards, can push it on further.


4

Posted by John S Bolton on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:10 | #

Would autism be noticed if it were at high prevalence among reservation indians or Australian aborigines? Or would it be put down as retardation or some cultural feature found in extreme degree, like the ‘wooden indian’ description?


5

Posted by John S Bolton on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:27 | #

Here is an example of the sort of transmission that occurs along these lines:          ...“the first outbreak of fluoroquinolone-resistant salmonella infection in the US. There outbreak affected eleven patients in two nursing homes and one hospital in Oregon. The putative agent was S. enterica serotype Schwarzengrund which was recovered in urine cultures from nine patients. The index case was a patient previously hospitalized in the Philippines and assumed to have acquired the infection there. ” from JHU infectious disease report…


6

Posted by John S Bolton on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:42 | #

The above quotation is from: Nosocomial Outbreak of Fluoroquinolone-Resistant Salmonella Infection [Olsen SJ et al.  NEJM 2001; 344:1572


7

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 10:45 | #

<a >Try this link</a>, John. It is the dump of all the correlations in rank order down to r=0.  I do have the 1998 Philippines immigration data in the database but it appears to have produced a negative correlation—which is not included in that dump.

I didn’t expect to see much of a correlation with Philippine immigration since Philippine immigration has been going on for a lot longer than the purported epidemic explosion of autism.  Moreover, Philippine immigration doesn’t appear co-located with the high tech centers of the US the way Indian immigration does.

Finally, I think this is a situation where the susceptible population is small so the organism, or whatever is causing the autism, hasn’t evolved a great deal of virulence and indeed may have undergone a lot of vertical transmission thereby reducing its virulence.  If it is an organism, it is likely an endemic organism that happens to be most deliterious to people with unique genetic characteristics of Finland—possibly even the Saami.


8

Posted by John S Bolton on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 11:31 | #

Ubiquitous pathogens are acquired by infants, most often vertically transmitted. Now many of the same pathogens can be transmitted vertically as in hospital nurseries, which is an opportunity for greater virulence. If recent hunter gatherer populations are thought to be susceptible; then perhaps these should be scanned for what otherwise would not be called autism, but retardation or cultural difference.
I would still like the bacteria which causes non-disfiguring leprosy to be looked into in connection with some kinds of autism. India has released its leprosy staff to work abroad, as the incidence rapidly declined from the 1970’s.
Another suggestion is age of the father,i.e. mutated sperm. We know have uncommonly old couples having children, as with fertility drugs. there could be a great many more births to remarried couples where the wife is over 40, and the husband over sixty and willing to spend what it takes to start his second family.


9

Posted by David B on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 12:36 | #

I’m not sure if James Bowery’s ‘Finnish/Indian’ hypothesis is intended as a Swiftian satire, but if not, it should be pointed out that autism has increased dramatically in countries like the UK and New Zealand with practically no Finnish immigration.  As to the ‘Indian’ part of the hypothesis, it might be worth testing the possibility that something in Indian food is responsible for autism, but the obvious difficulty is that autism appears first in young children who are not, as a rule, big fans of spicy foods.


10

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:12 | #

Now many of the same pathogens can be transmitted vertically as in hospital nurseries, which is an opportunity for greater virulence.

John, did you mean “transmitted horizontally as in hospital nurseries”?

I would still like the bacteria which causes non-disfiguring leprosy to be looked into in connection with some kinds of autism. India has released its leprosy staff to work abroad, as the incidence rapidly declined from the 1970’s.

Pathogens that produce subclinical infections are difficult to get even ecological statistics precisely because their pathologies are subclinical.  This, by the way, is a major weakness in the ethical case for mass immigration. There is absolutely no way to appropriately underwrite the risks.

Nevertheless, if you happen upon such statistics on a by-State level, I’ll subject them to the same tests.

Another suggestion is age of the father,i.e. mutated sperm.

This is a serious possibility.  I have figures on the age of the parents proxied by the age of the mother at her first live birth and the correlation with just that single variable is r=.50 with a probability of being due to chance less than .001.  This is just above the correlation with Finnish ancestry at r=.47.  It would be worth digging a bit more in that direction.


11

Posted by James Bowery on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:32 | #

David B writes: autism has increased dramatically in countries like the UK and New Zealand with practically no Finnish immigration.

Well autism has increased dramatically in countries like Finland with practically no Finnish immigration.

The point is that if you look at the distribution of the genes for susceptibility, the fact that they are highest in Finland doesn’t mean they won’t exist in substantial numbers in other countries.  Saying autism has increased in countries A, B and C doesn’t say what the relative levels of autism are in between A, B and C.

autism appears first in young children who are not, as a rule, big fans of spicy [Indian JAB] foods.

The question isn’t whether the children are eating the food but whether middle to upper middle class working couples who eat Indian food would be putting their children at risk via vertical transmission of the pathogen.

Of course, hypothesizing a pathogen in the food is only one way of explaining the pattern observed.  Bolton has come up with another and I’m sure there are more.  At a place I worked in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s, the CEO was rumored to be a pedophile and had hired a _very_ young man from India as his “personal assistant”.  Somewhere along the line the men’s restroom of the workplace was smeared in feces.  Out of 100 employees, 3 of them had children diagnosed with autism.  Yes I did report the cluster to official academic researchers into autism and no they didn’t bother investigating.  But I was assured by one Berkeley researcher that “Yes we know of such microclusters…. “, blah, blah.


12

Posted by John S Bolton on Wed, 01 Feb 2006 08:40 | #

In terms of hospital nurseries, I meant horizontal transmission, not vertical. I recall someone from the time when autism incidence was on the order of 1/1000. This was the kind where they repeat back the last two words of what you say, and not likely otherwise speak. His father was an elderly German-jewish immigrant, and he had certain highly specialized stamp-collecting interests. Out of more than 1000 children in that area, this was the only case I remember.  Since then, I’ve heard of autism appearing in black children.
One black woman had vitiligo, and a child who would memorize bus schedules, and was otherwise in what seemed to be the autistic pattern.
Vitiligo is indistinguishable from the mild kind of leprosy without testing which is seldom if ever done.
Salmonella is a good candidate pathogen; it is ubiquitous and capable of shifting to virulent form. Immigrants are known to bring in even the worst kind, which causes typhoid fever.
Likewise, a salmonella infection which adults wouldn’t even notice enough, to stop going to some ethnic restaurant; could be more than virulent enough to disrupt the development of a fast growing infant brain.
In this connection, it could be recalled how the missions in California, wiped out the native hunter gatherers, by constraining them to live in villages year round; where, among other pathogens, the salmonella of typhoid fever killed them off
One of the constraints on the settlement of such populations has been their susceptibility to infections, such as salmonella. They’ve had to change genetically to lose their high susceptibilities of this kind.


13

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:03 | #

Since then, I’ve heard of autism appearing in black children.

The only studies of autism that included a breakdown by race that I’ve been able to find are the City of Atlanta and Montana State.  In the Atlanta study there was no racial bias. 

In the Montana study whites had a risk ratio of 1.4 in 2000 and it has been increasing to about 2.0 now.  Also Montana is #3 in Finns per capita but in 2000 it was dead last in immigrants from India.  It was the state ranked #43 in autism in 2000.  I don’t have the trend data on immigrant density by country of origin for Montana, nor do I have the current by-State autism data inclusive of Montana.


14

Posted by James Bowery on Wed, 01 Feb 2006 22:39 | #

BTW: I did a bit of research on the paternal age hypothesis.  It appears to be an established fact that the risk of schizophrenia among offspring of older fathers (age 50 or so) is 3%—much higher than the risk higher than the risk of schizophrenia of offspring to younger fathers.  However, <a >it does not appear that the incidence of schizophrenia has increased</a> so it seems unlikely that increased father’s age is the (primary) cause of the the rise of autism diagnoses.



Post a comment:


Name: (required)

Email: (required but not displayed)

URL: (optional)

Note: You should copy your comment to the clipboard or paste it somewhere before submitting it, so that it will not be lost if the session times out.

Remember me


Next entry: The first piece of good news
Previous entry: Getting it straight

image of the day

Existential Issues

DNA Nations

Categories

Contributors

Each author's name links to a list of all articles posted by the writer.

Links

Endorsement not implied.

Immigration

Islamist Threat

Anti-white Media Networks

Audio/Video

Crime

Economics

Education

General

Historical Re-Evaluation

Controlled Opposition

Nationalist Political Parties

Science

Europeans in Africa

Of Note

Comments

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Soren Renner Is Dead' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 23:47. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Soren Renner Is Dead' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 23:15. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Soren Renner Is Dead' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 22:48. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 22:02. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Soren Renner Is Dead' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:55. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 16:38. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 14:36. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:50. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 10:26. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Thu, 28 Mar 2024 05:37. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:07. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:00. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Tue, 26 Mar 2024 05:02. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:39. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Out of foundation and into the mind-body problem, part four' on Mon, 25 Mar 2024 09:56. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Mon, 25 Mar 2024 07:51. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Mon, 25 Mar 2024 07:46. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Mon, 25 Mar 2024 07:41. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sun, 24 Mar 2024 12:25. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:42. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 22:01. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 21:20. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 20:51. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 20:45. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 17:26. (View)

Manc commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 15:56. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:55. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 14:07. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 13:12. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 12:51. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Out of foundation and into the mind-body problem, part four' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 12:38. (View)

Guessedworker commented in entry 'Moscow's Bataclan' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 10:01. (View)

Al Ross commented in entry 'Out of foundation and into the mind-body problem, part four' on Sat, 23 Mar 2024 05:13. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Out of foundation and into the mind-body problem, part four' on Fri, 22 Mar 2024 23:51. (View)

Thorn commented in entry 'Out of foundation and into the mind-body problem, part four' on Thu, 21 Mar 2024 11:14. (View)

affection-tone