(on a different note, I didn’t start properly socializing about 19. I just had some weirdass friends until then)

On the one hand I agree with you that pointing fingers at engineers and scientists as the “weirdos” of the society is doing nothing any good and a lot of harm. People do not realize how important these “out-of-the-box” thinkers are. Where would we all be without the DaVincis, Newtons, Einsteins, Gateses, Jobses (is this a correct way to make plural from the names ending in an s by the way?), Pages, and Brins? And having studies concentrate on “phenotypes” within the science and engineering professions seem pointless. It’s not like the psychologists themselves are the “normal” bunch. (And that’s fine, it’s the ATs (atypicals) that make the world interesting.) Plus, hypothesizing that certain professions are more prone to have children with autism (which still is a very broad term, too broad if you ask me, and encompasses a huge range of symptoms) is borderline dangerous.

On the other hand, I’m still on the fence about labels. Yes, I too get annoyed at the prevalent tendency to label and categorize everyone, at every stage of their life, measure their intelligence, personalities, interests, etc., etc. But in our case, having a “label” for our child did guarantee him services. He has had help with learning “social skills” for a couple of years now and I must say that has helped and his improvement is noticeable by people who had known him since he was little. You may ask if that is not just the matter of maturity, and some of it may be, but not entirely. It’s very hard for people to understand that someone might have a hard time learning social interactions naturally, but the fact is that our son needs to have it pointed out to him what to say (or what not to say) in certain situations and he needs practice to get it right. As Debra pointed out in her comment to “Why are white lies considered ‘politeness’“ that “There’s no reason, by the way, that people with learning disabilities can’t master these social rules. It just takes longer, and it takes a lot of motivation.” So I believe in our case the “label” is actually giving our son help in learning how to interact with people, not the opposite.

The real worry I have about this name-o-philia is that it turns into a reinforcing cycle: parents who are told that their kids won’t ever have good social skills I guarantee you will train those poor kids to not have good social skills by excusing their every social foible with “oh forgive her she’s got autism spectrum disorder”. Look back at Einstein and Newton – two fools who quite obviously would have slotted right into “ASD” classifications. Except for the fact that they had to go to school and socialize just like everyone else.

I argue this (in a nutshell): definitions and names are self-fulfilling (look at the fifties and all of the nervous disorders), and more damaging because they give individuals an excuse for not learning how to interact or deal in society.

You did not mention your post about the same article on your blog, so let me do it – everyone, please go to “This should be on the list for this year’s Ig Nobels” from January 10, 2009.

It’s interesting that your mom noticed fourteen years ago that fathers of the autistic children she knew were engineers. In the light of the study, I wonder if they were not first-borns and as such had a “broader autistic phenotype” without being autistic themselves. Among the families with children with autism that we befriended I know the profession of only a few fathers and mothers. Some of them are computer programmers (either father or mother, sometimes both), but for instance one dad is an artist – a graphic designer and a guitar player in a band. Maybe it’s the creative mind? You do have to be creative to do math and science…

Regarding wives who take care of their husbands – I vaguely remember watching a program about a scientist who got so engrossed in his research that his wife would come to the lab with lunch and actually feed him while continued working. I do not remember the name of the guy, though… I’m very bad with names. I think if one dug deeper into the lives of great scientists and discoverers something that would turn out to be quite a pattern, although maybe not to that extreme.

In closing, I hope that your not wanting to have children is simply because you don’t like the little brats (which I completely understand, I absolutely did not want to have children when I was in my twenties either), not because of your diagnosis, because that is not a good reason not to have children, in my opinion. I used to know a guy who has type 1 diabetes, and he said once he does not want to have children because there was a chance that the child would have diabetes as well. I don’t remember the odds, but the chance that his child would not have diabetes was actually higher. Now, I don’t know what it’s like to live with diabetes, I’m sure it’s not a bed of roses. But that guy was married, he was otherwise fairly happy with his life (or so I thought) and had lots of friends. If his mom had been told that her child would have diabetes and had decided not to have him, all of those people would have lost on not never getting to know him. Yet, he did not want to have a child, because the kid could be like him – could have diabetes. I think that’s sad because that sounded to me like he was seeing himself mainly in the light of his illness and he was so much more than “a diabetic,” and what he said also had the same ring to me as if he said “I wish I had never been born.” That is why I’m still very ambivalent about genetic testing.

Anecdotally, my mom has also observed this about autistic children tending to have engineers for fathers. When we lived in Iowa, about fourteen years ago, we were fairly active in the autism society there, so we met a fair number of other families with autistic children. My mom tells me that a whole lot of them (just like our family) had engineer fathers and nurse mothers. My mom hypothesized that the fathers were sub-clinically autistic themselves, and needed wives who would take care of them a bit more than the average man needs his wife to take care of him.

(I am a boxy woman, with a degree in science — biochemistry — and an autism-spectrum diagnosis. My partner also has a degree in science — he’s ABD in paleontology — but is not autistic, although he does seem to have many of the traits. We do not want children, but if we did, there’d probably be a decent chance of one being autistic.)