Friday, January 23, 2015

An Incomplete List of Things that Have Been Postulated, In Earnest, as Possible Causes of Autism

(Note: Not all of these ideas are crank hypotheses; some of them are, a few were widely accepted in their day but are now regarded as crank notions, many are just people throwing things out there on the strength of statistical correlations, some have a fairly impressive body of evidence supporting them, and some are ones that I consider crankish but not everyone does -- the Extreme Male Brain theory being an example of this latter category. I do not use my "bizarre autism hypotheses" tag exclusively for bad science; just everything that strikes me as odd.)

In no particular order:

This is an incomplete list, so feel free to add anything you've heard that I have not listed here in the comments!

4 comments:

D Marcotte said...

I love the idea that circumcision somehow caused my daughters autism :)

Hi there - I found a link to your site on Autistic Hoya's website. I don't see any contact information here so I am hoping that you still get these comments.

My name is Dawn Marcotte and I am looking for autistic adults who might be willing to write an article for my website, www.asd-dr.com.

I want to run a series of articles for autistic teens who are thinking about college. Right now I am hoping for topics like college prep, life skills, things you wish you had known etc. But I am certainly open to other ideas.

I firmly believe in the saying, "Nothing for us without us." As I am not autistic I don't really feel qualified to write these kinds of articles.

If you are interested in this idea could you please contact me? My email is dmarcottefreelance (at) live (dot) com.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Anonymous said...

Given the similarities between some stereotypes of autistic people and some stereotypes of Asian people, I'm almost surprised "You are Asian" and "Your mom is Asian" didn't make the list.

Anonymous said...

PETA is trying to convince people that dairy causes autism and we should all go vegan or die of autism.

PETA doesn't really seem all that smarty in the head to imply that are they?

Google search "got autism?"

Lindsay said...

@April 13th Anon -- that's weird, I was sure I already had "drinking milk" on the list, since I have totally seen those bizarre PETA ads before!

Oh, well, it's on there now.