Comment by tsol
1 day ago
I wonder if autism is a similar kind of selection process. They are people selected by nature to be obsessed about different things, but this could be incredibly fruitful if you end up focused on the right thing. Of course in this situation we have no control over the selection process, it's a product of living in a world that's difficult to
You may find the recently published article “A General Principle of Neuronal Evolution Reveals a Human-Accelerated Neuron Type Potentially Underlying the High Prevalence of Autism in Humans” interesting.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/9/msaf189/8245036
Avoiding spoilers, Peter Watts' works have parts which show what happens when this idea is taken to its logical extreme.