Asperger's Syndrome

[Tim May]

On Wednesday, May 7, 2003, at 06:17  PM, Harmon Seaver wrote:

>   Ah, yes, just think what the modern protective society is doing to 
> the gene
> pool. Eyeglasses is just one example -- how many people today would 
> starve
> quickly if thrown back into a hunting/gathering culture without their 
> specs?

  Except there's no strong evidence that people without glasses saw 
better a thousand years ago. Maybe 10 thousand years ago.

A lot of the "eagle eyes" were just people with naturally 20-20 vision. 
In most European and Asian societies going way, way back, most people 
didn't need good long and near vision past a certain age. They held 
things close, they squinted, and likely they did OK even in hunting 
parties where the animals were herded over cliffs or into box canyons.

Eyeglasses have become common only in the past 100 years (and arguably 
in the past 60 years, about since the time visits to eye doctors became 
common). While there have been jokes about "four eyes" not breeding, 
because they can't get dates, neither this theory nor the converse 
appear to have any correlation with actual breeding patterns. Do more 
kids today need glasses than 100 years ago? Than 500 years ago? Than 
5000 years ago? An interesting question, but claims that the past 
60-100 years of eyeglass wearing have caused some major change in 
genetics seems to be a stretch.


> Or
> just look at the difference in the last 100 years or so, where 
> children who were
> "slow" were kept home on the farm, never married; whereas today they 
> move out on
> their own, meet others like themselves, breed. And I'm not even 
> talking about
> the welfare aspect, or the seriously retarded -- when I was a kid 
> there were a
> lot of families with members who stayed home with the folks, or went 
> to live
> with various relations, just a little too slow or too spooky.

I agree that things are very different now.

I look at the economic side, mostly. Once the slow, or the drunkardly, 
or the inept, served on farms and estates and kept the horses, did 
gardening, and so on. Today, we pay them to sit at home and eat Doritos 
while watching Oprah. And yard workers are hard to find, and expensive.

(I just got in from a muddy and dirty day spent moving dirt and sand, 
spent planting a Minneola Tangelo, and a couple of shrubs. Nearly five 
hours out digging, shoveling, mixing soil with amendments and manure, 
digging holes, planting, soaking the root balls, then cleaning up. 
Which is why I'm now posting, five hours after going out, exhausted, 
but happy to be back online. And I did much the same a few days ago, 
and a few days before that, and so on. Those who have been to my house 
know I have 1.5 acres on a hilltop, and it needs a lot of work to keep 
the weeds and chapparal from encroaching. My point? The cheap 
labor--the retards, the shiftless, the drunks--is now being paid out of 
my taxes (approaching 60% of what I earn) to collect AFDC, welfare, and 
the catch-all "disability." We need to abolish all of these payments 
and make the 'tards, the drunks, the unskilled all realize they either 
hoe the land for a relative pittance or they starve.)

(I would hire some of the illegal alien Mexicans who hang out at our 
local K-Mart except some of them have reportedly tumbled to the fact 
that they can do a day's work and then threaten to report their illegal 
work (no SSNs, no Disability Insurance, blah blah) to the INS, who is 
more interested in catching a gringo hiring wetbacks than in deporting 
the wetbacks. Also, there are injury scams to collect payouts from 
gringo suckas.)

--Tim May