But to me that reads like different statement than yours of neurodiversity being a survival trait, to which I have to disagree.
Being a neurodiverse, or more commonly known "on the spectrum", is a guaranteed way to get bullied (or worse) by your peers who are not. How is that supposed to help with survival?
Some neurodiverse kids and even adults get bullied so hard they commit self termination (to avoid using the 's' word). That's exactly the opposite of helping with survival.
Helping with survival to me means having features that help you get accepted by the heard and with finding a mate to reproduce, not features that get you shunned and outcasted till you end up wirtten off the gene pool.
I see it more as a survival trait for a population, not an individual. An individual does not need to procreate for a population to benefit from any trait they may have. In that sense, the trait may be a disadvantage for the individual, but increase the well-being of the population at large. An unimaginative example would be an autistic individual whose condition enables them to make a life-saving scientific or mathematical breakthrough, but due to the same condition ultimately dies alone and childless.
> Being a neurodiverse, or more commonly known "on the spectrum", is a guaranteed way to get bullied (or worse) by your peers who are not.
Is it? Hardly. I have been diagnosed, but was never bullied. I don't bully my neurodiverse peers, and I think new generations are, in some cases, more kind than our predecessors in this particular area.
I think unkindness towards neurodiversity is a particular facet of particular societies, and not a general aspect of the human organism.
>Being a neurodiverse, or more commonly known "on the spectrum", is a guaranteed way to get bullied (or worse) by your peers who are not. How is that supposed to help with survival?
Well, human life doesn't begin and end with school and bullying, nor was bullying like that necessarily as much of a thing in other eras (or other cultures), especially since we're talking prehistory.
It's easier for someone with ASD to have social relations and be accepted when everybody is part of small tribe or village and sees each other everyday for example - like for most of human history.
Also for the most part of history "being cool" wasn't really a preoccupation of people, even kids.
>Helping with survival to me means having features that help you get accepted by the heard and with finding a mate to reproduce, not features that get you shunned and outcasted till you end up wirtten off the gene pool.
It can also mean having traits that benefit the tribe, like problem solving and inventing things (or as researched regarding ADHD, "be better at hunting"), even if you're not very socially adept.
In many cultures even the "mad" were respected - considered touched by the spirits, samans, etc. Not just some ancient tribes either, all the way to modernity, including in aspects of Christianity ("holy fools").
> Being a neurodiverse, or more commonly known "on the spectrum", is a guaranteed way to get bullied (or worse) by your peers who are not. How is that supposed to help with survival?
Schools as a concept are a relatively new thing, historically speaking. Most children outside of those recruited by/given to the clergy used to be homeschooled, either by their parents or for privileged families by dedicated servants, and when they were of age, they went to trades training or the military. And that was fine, because most jobs were manual labor and didn't require a lot of actual knowledge - not even the ability to read and write, literacy rates were abysmal in the utter majority of the population [1]. Side note, that was also why religion got so entrenched - oftentimes, the local clergy were about the only people in town that were actually able to read the Bible and to speak/translate Latin. That gave them a loooot of power.
Only at the beginning of industrialization came the realization that societies and economies needed at least some common basic standard set of knowledge and that homeschooling could not provide this, so schools were introduced for efficiency reasons.
The root misunderstanding is the "social species" part of my statement. Neurodiversity benefits the species, so it will be selected for as a survival trait for the species, even if it is recessive or those who express it never reproduce. Those "genetically adjacent" benefit and keep the traits alive
If you think survival traits mean being healthy and happy, ask Darwin why the evolution of caterpillars killed his faith in god.
Assuming it's random.. it isn't like every divergent feature in nature is advantageous. My own theory is a lot of the neurodivergence stems from generational shifts in refined foods, fats in particular and especially the low fat efforts in the 80's that carries to today. That affects hormones, that shifts reproduction... and many shifts tend to amplify generationally.
I feel like this overgeneralizes autism. It's not the guaranteed social death sentence you seem to be describing. It's a spectrum, and there's more to it than social issues.
One aspect you're discounting is obsession. Imagine the stereotypical person who knows everything there is to know about trains. Now imagine they were born a millennia ago and focused instead on the weather or soil or logistics or taxes. I can see that being quite valuable, not just to the individual, but to society around them! Value can drive success (particularly if you obsess about it), and success is attractive.
As an extreme example, Elon Musk is autistic. I'm positive he got bullied in school, but I'm also sure he has more kids than you and me.
Not only those essential bodies of knowledge, but anyone who has tried to develop not even a novel product but simply a well executed brand knows the level of almost superhuman focus it takes. Implying that much of what is on the shelf is brought to us by such individuals.
That said, this observation is classically subject to survivorship bias. The real issue is the masses of failures underneath, and those who were never even given an opportunity to fail. Their lives were and are also valuable.
Can you please explain what you mean by this?