Uriah

My belief is that kids born around the same year as Tom Brady received the maximum beneficial dose of growth and nutrition before we reached some kind of Omega Point that natural selection had never designed us for.

For most of history the average North European male height was 5’5-5’6”, with exceptionally good conditions leading to heights of up to 5’8”. Through most of history people never even came close to maxing out their size, producing a problem natural selection has yet to solve.

If you have autistic relatives, you might be curious how this kind of growth spillover actually leads to autism. My stance is that much of autism qualifies as “precocious depression”, in which normal depressive symptoms occur so early as to become fixed.

Depression and autism are both characterized by low levels of brain blood flow; from a certain fmri point of view autism doesn’t look _like_ depression it looks like it IS depression, but depression that begins at an abnormally early point in development.

When people become depressed they undergo mental declines in areas like psychomotor speed and episodic memory for real events that sometimes outlast the depression by months. The decline in memory leads to a kind of self-centered rumination reminiscent of autism.

Hopefully that makes sense, but what’s much more baffling is how exactly autism would be associated with high intelligence, likely having something to do with their overgrown frontal lobes.