Autism: Common, heritable, but not harmful

Behav Brain Sci. 2006 Aug;29(4):413-414. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X06319097.

Abstract

We assert that one of the examples used by Keller & Miller (K&M), namely, autism, is indeed common, and heritable, but we question whether it is harmful. We provide a brief review of cognitive science literature in which autistics perform superiorly to non-autistics in perceptual, reasoning, and comprehension tasks; however, these superiorities are often occluded and are instead described as dysfunctions.