Note: A weasel word is an informal term for words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that a specific or meaningful statement has been made, when instead only a vague or ambiguous claim has actually been communicated.

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University of Edinburgh, May 2016

Autism genes and intelligence link found

Genes linked with a greater risk of developing autism may also be associated with higher intelligence, a study suggests. Researchers have found new evidence linking genetic factors associated with autism to better cognitive ability in people who do not have the condition.

Note the unfortunate and misleading use of “linked” in this context: “linked genes” are, specifically, genes that are located on the same chromosome. That’s not what is meant here: this is very sloppy word usage and causes a great deal of confusion about genes and autism.

Autism is a developmental disability that can cause significant language and speech difficulties.

Developmental disorder

The relationship between autism and intelligence is not clear, researchers say.

Up to 70 per cent of individuals with autism have an intellectual disability, but some people with the disorder have higher than average non-verbal intelligence, the team says. (Verbal and visual intelligence ARE NOT mutually exclusive!) Non-verbal intelligence enables people to solve complex problems using visual and hands-on reasoning skills requiring little or no use of language.

Wow! Thank-you for acknowledging visual intelligence! But might this be evidence that Asperger people are simply “visually dominant” processors and thinkers who have been misidentified as autistic, due to social prejudice regarding nonconformity to social expectations?

It is a whopping contradiction to maintain that intellectual disability and visual intellectual ability are both identifying symptoms of developmental “failure”. 1. Either intelligence has nothing at all to do with “autism” or 2. Verbal intelligence is developmentally “correct” but “visual intelligence” is developmentally “incorrect”. Logic? Nonsense.

Cognitive ability

Researchers analysed almost 10,000 people recruited from the general population of Scotland. Individuals were tested for general cognitive ability and had their DNA analysed. The team found that among people who never develop autism, carrying genetic traits (!) associated with the disorder is, on average, linked to scoring slightly better on cognitive tests. In other words; this is total “WT” – “weasel talk”

Intellectual advantage

Researchers found further evidence of a link between autism-associated genes and intelligence when they carried out the same tests on 921 adolescents who were part of the Brisbane Adolescent Twin Study. (weasel words)

There are no “statistical” brains; there are ONLY SPECIFIC BRAINS. The “numbers” allotted as “intelligence points” are not intelligence; intelligence cannot be “statistically” spread across “brains”.

The study suggests genes for autism may actually confer, on average, a small intellectual advantage in those who carry them, provided they are not affected by autism.

Yikes! Intelligence is a complex characteristic, with many components, often culturally defined. No one has solved the almost impossible task of getting people to agree on “what IT is”, and yet here we have the typical irrational insistence that one “unproven, unconfirmed guess” is the magical key to intelligence. And most egregious, the contribution of the person’s environment is ignored!

The study is published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The research was funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates, Scottish Funding Council, The Wellcome Trust, The Medical Research Council and Age UK.

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Genetic Literacy Project website https://www.geneticliteracyproject/2016/03/23/genes-linked-autism-also-common-in-general-population/

Genes linked to autism also common in general population

Nicola Davis | March 23, 2016 | Guardian

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

The same genes involved in predisposing people to autism appear to influence social skills in the wider population, suggesting that the autism spectrum has no clear cut-off point, scientists have discovered. (We’re mixing apples and oranges here: social skills and general intelligence)

Researchers have previously shown that autism is linked not just to one or two powerful genes, but to the combined effect of many small genetic changes.

The latest findings, published in Nature Genetics, suggest that social charm, empathy and the ability to make friends is about more than just practice and upbringing, but is also affected by how many of these autism risk gene variants we possess.

Dr Elise Robinson, from Harvard University and a lead author on the paper, said: “This is the first study that specifically shows that … factors that we have unambiguously associated with autism are also very clearly associated with social communication differences in the general population.” Really? C’mon! This is a sweeping generalization that cannot be “tested” and “proven, disproven” by the scientific method. It’s NARRATIVE: storytelling, not fact.

But at last, some common sense: Rather than viewing a person as either having or not having such a disorder, Robinson believes our social skills are better viewed as sitting on a sliding scale across the whole population. Did we not already know this? Yes. It’s reasonable observation, and has been for thousands of years. Why have millions of $$$, been spent to arrive at the obvious?

Autism spectrum disorders are linked with a range of behaviours, including difficulties in communicating with others, maintaining friendships and empathising. As opposed to the “difficulties in communicating with others, maintaining friendships and empathising” that the typical person experiences!

“Across the genome, [around] 30% of the common inherited genetic influences on ASDs [austism spectrum disorders] are shared with the common inherited influences on social communication behaviour across the population,” said Robinson. Meaning that Autism is an invented “label” for a range of non-genetic, possibly genetic, and ‘known” genetic conditions.

Read full, original post: Autism spectrum has no clear cut-off point, research suggests

public domain document

Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by impaired social interactions and repetitive behaviors, often accompanied by abnormal reactions to sensory stimuli. ASD is generally thought to be caused by deficits in brain development, but a study in mice, published June 9 in Cell, now suggests that at least some aspects of the disorder (Rhett’s Syndrome only?)—including how touch is perceived, anxiety, and social abnormalities—are linked to defects in another area of the nervous system, the peripheral nerves found throughout the limbs, digits, and other parts of the body that communicate sensory information to the brain. This is an out-and- out fraudulent statement.

“An underlying assumption has been that ASD is solely a disease (ASD is not a disease, it’s a vast conglomeration of ) of the brain, but we’ve found that may not always be the case,” says senior author David Ginty, a Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “Advances in mouse genetics have made it possible for us to study genes linked to ASD (more fudge!) by altering them only in certain types of nerve cells and studying the effects.”

In the new study, the researchers examined the effects of gene mutations known to be associated with ASD in humans. This is a gross misrepresentation; if this claim were TRUE, the words “confirmed or proven” would appear, and not the WEASEL-WORDS “known to be associated with”. “Associated with” means “unfounded hearsay that we made up ourselves, but are attributing to some non-existent (magical) authoritative source in order to make our beliefs seem like science.”

In particular, they focused on Mecp2, which causes Rett syndrome, a disorder that is often associated with ASD, and Gabrb3, which also is implicated in ASD. Another WEASEL-WORD. They looked at two other genes connected to ASD-like behaviors as well. More WEASEL_BABBLE. How many times can researchers “fudge” language in one study? It’s unethical and its use is intended to provide protection and denial in case anyone should question the grandiose and false claims on the part of researchers.

These genes are believed to be essential for the normal function of nerve cells, and previous studies have linked these mutations to problems with synaptic function—how neurons communicate with each other. In humans, mice, rats, computer simulations, radios, isolated neurons in petri dishes?

“Although we know about several genes associated with ASD (I smell fudge!), a challenge and a major goal has been to find where in the nervous system the problems occur,” Ginty says. OMG! “By engineering mice that have these mutations only in their peripheral sensory neurons, which detect light touch stimuli acting on the skin, we’ve shown that mutations there are both necessary and sufficient for creating mice with an abnormal hypersensitivity to touch.” OMG!

Let me get this straight:

1. Create mutations in mice that make them hyper-reactive to touch sensation. (Not “real” mice, but those who have been bred and altered over and over again until they are utterly artificial life forms.)

2. Touch the mice (with puffs of air directed to their backs)

3. “Observe” subjectively that the mice react “abnormally” (Compared with what standard? Where are the controls? Missing of course, because they might interfere with the “conclusions before hypothesis” design of the study = CHEATING

4. Declare that the artificial mutations that were made with the purpose of creating hyper-reactive mice indeed succeeded and then produce conclusions about ASD that utterly illegitimate . (A high school student could carry this one off. Chop a leg off a dog: demonstrate that a dog with three legs is mobility impaired. Applaud yourself for clever discovery that diminished polar ice caps are caused by too many ice cubes in ice tea drinks.)

5. Despite the “study” ( a fudge word meaning that this is not a SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT) has no valid connection to ASD (it only deals with Rett syndrome and even that is questionable) But, the researcher jump to the totally unwarranted conclusion that this minor time-and-money wasting effort has significant standing in the “War on Autism.” The study has nothing to do with autism: It’s about successfully creating mutant mice.

The investigators measured how the mice reacted to touch stimuli, such as a light puff of air on their backs, and tested whether they could discriminate between objects with different textures. Mice with ASD gene mutations only their sensory neurons exhibited heightened sensitivity to touch stimuli and were unable to discriminate between textures. The transmission of neural impulses between the touch-sensitive neurons in the skin and the spinal cord neurons that relay touch signals to the brain was also abnormal. Together, these results show that mice with ASD-associated gene mutations have deficits in tactile perception.

OMG! What a whopper! These mice don’t have ASD mutations; they have mutations created by the researchers!

The investigators next examined anxiety and social interactions in the mice using established tests looking at how much mice avoided being out in the open and how much they interacted with mice they’d never seen before. Anthropomorphism: attributing human behavior to animals and objects: in the lab, this is reversed: attributing the artificially induced-created behavior of mice to human children. Surprisingly, the animals with ASD gene mutations (this tactic is: repeat an untrue statement enough times and people will believe it’s true) only in peripheral sensory neurons showed heightened anxiety and interacted less with other mice. “How closely these behaviors mimic anxiety seen in ASD in humans is up for debate,” Ginty says, “but in our field, these are well-established measures ( a conspiracy of agreed-to terms, that if applied repeatedly and consistently, will successfully deter inquiries from other disciplines) with of what we consider to be anxiety-like behavior and social interaction deficits.”(anxiety-like? What behavior is “like anxiety”?)

“A key aspect of this work is that we’ve shown that a tactile, somatosensory dysfunction contributes to behavioral deficits, something that hasn’t been seen before,” Ginty says. “In this case, that deficit is anxiety and problems with social interactions.” How problems with processing the sense of touch lead to anxiety and social problems isn’t clear at this point, however. WOW! This gets the Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire award for intellectual dishonesty!

“Based on our findings, we think mice with these ASD-associated gene mutations Again, these are not ASD gene mutations, which have yet to be proven to exist. These are mutations created by the researchers themselves, which they then proceed to “discover.”

These micehave a major defect in the ‘volume switch’ in their peripheral sensory neurons,” says first author Lauren Orefice, a postdoctoral fellow in Ginty’s lab. Essentially, she says, the volume is turned up all the way in these neurons, leading the animals to feel touch at an exaggerated, heightened level.

“We think it works the same way in humans with ASD,” Ginty adds.

THIS IS HARVARD Can you imagine the quality of research at the average academic research facility?

“The sense of touch is important for mediating our interactions with the environment, and for how we navigate the world around us,” Orefice says. “An abnormal sense of touch is only one aspect of ASD, (this has never been established as the “cause” or source of sensory sensitivity in some ASDs) and while we don’t claim this explains all the pathologies seen in people, defects in touch processing may help (fudge) to explain some of the behaviors observed in patients with ASD.”

The investigators are now looking for approaches that might turn the “volume” back down to normal levels in the peripheral sensory neurons, including both genetic and (here we have the point of this pointless study)

pharmaceutical approaches. $$$$$$$$$$$

Explore further: Children with autism experience interrelated health issues

More information: Cell, Orefice et al: “Peripheral mechanosensory neuron dysfunction underlies tactile and behavioral deficits in mouse models of ASD.” http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)30584-0 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.05.033