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!