Does match.com cause autism?

Great Debates
1

An article on rotten.com’s library (yes, it’s part of the rather infamous rotten.com, but some of the written articles in the library section of the site–as opposed to the gross photographs–are relatively thought-provoking) makes the suggestion that on-line dating and friendship services may be responsible for the recent rise in autism diagnoses. Their reasoning: There’s evidence that autism has a genetic cause, autistic people lack social skills, and on-line dating services allow people who lack social skills to meet and procreate with other such people.

My factual questions:
[ul]
[li]Is there any evidence that autism has genetic causes?[/li][li]What percentage of people with sub-standard social skills have an autism related disorder?[/li][li]This may be a longshot, as I’d be surprised if there were any rigorous studies done on on-line dating services, but: How many people have procreated as a result of on-line communities?, and, assuming that all people who use online services are autistic and all their children will be autistic, would the results of those on-line unions be enough to account for a significant portion of the recent rise in diagnosis?[/li][/ul]
Note that I don’t agree with either of my assumptions in the last question, I just include them because if the answer to the last question is “no,” even with those two assumptions, the premise of the article can be written off. :slight_smile:

2

Doh! I ment to put that in GQ. :frowning:

3

I work in technology <i>and</i> I met my current girlfriend through match.com. However, I take no responsibility for the decreased intelligence of the American population. It was like that when I got here, I swear.

4

Well, it looks good on paper…

5

It’s generally accepted that there is a genetic component to autism.

There was an article in Wired which I think is on-line which postulated that the high rates of autism/Aspergers in Silicon Valley was caused by the intermarrying of people with autistic traits and genes. Personally I doubt that match.com and the like have had a big enough impact on the marrying patterns that we could attribute the increase in autism to internet dating. Maybe in a generation or two, it could become true.

In any case, this is a GD rather than a GQ. We don’t know enough about the causes of autism to definitively answer the theory.

6

The article cited seems to be a joke, so I don’t know it’s a great debate either.

7

I don’t think it’s a joke.

“Humorous” and “a joke” are two different things: although the article is written with a good dose of (dark) humor, I don’t think it’s a joke. The things it references are, as near as I can tell, real. In particular, there really is a “hug box” like what the article describes. :eek: Primaflora seemed to point out that intermarriage between people with autistic traits is regarded as a possible cause for the rise of autism by more people then whoever wrote that article.

It seems to me that, in order for the premise of the article to be valid,
[ul]
[li]There must be a genetic component to autism.[/li][li]People with autism who would otherwise not breed are meeting mates on-line.[/li][li]Both of the above factors together must be great enough to cause a statistically significant number of children with autism.[/li][/ul]
I don’t think any of those things are that far out, but I don’t know enough about the relevant fields to know that to any reasonable degree of certainty.

I planned to ask it in GQ because, although the questions can’t be answered definitively, people can still state the current beliefs of the relevant scientific communities (e.g., “Many studies have demonstrated that having an autistic parent increases the chance of an autistic child,” etc.)

8

Let’s start with Dr. Molly McButter, Ph.D., who supposedly “is a much sought-after child psychologist working near Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.” Her name is also a brand of dry butter flavoring (http://mollymcbutter.com). Googling her name + autism reveals one link – to the site you cite. If she’s a real person, she’s not well known.

If these are real children, the journalist won’t let that get in the way of a humorous relating of their conditions. One child is described as “bonking” his head with a pet food bowl; another stabs his father “in the buttock” with a meat thermometer. It doesn’t strike me as very sensitive if these are real children, but it also seems the journalist is casting about about for funny things to have the kids do. The photos seem staged, too. Of course since their names are changed there is no way to verify their existence.

However, we can verify the statistics. The article states that one person in 500 in the U.S. has autism. The autistic society says 4.5 in 10,000, which is fewer than 1 in 2000. It’s possibly true that autism is more common in California and seems to be more prevelant, the statistics still don’t seem to be anything like the numbers cited in the article. The final line of the article suggests that more people have autism than Down Syndrome, diabetes, and cancer combined… and claims over 1,000,000 people have autism. Casual googling shows that over 10,000,000 people have diabetes (http://www.shodor.org/master/biomed/physio/cadweb/stats.htm). So much for their stats.

In any case, once the article degenerates into talking about technology workers are probably autistic and the hugbox/cubicle design, it’s quite obviously a farce.

9

Um, you did see the first sentence in the article, right? The one that read “Names in this article have been changed to protect the identities of patients, parents, and healthcare professionals who wish to remain anonymous.”? It’s the sentence that immediately precedes the words “Dr. Molly McButter, Ph.D.”.

I’m not disagreeing with the assertion that the author isn’t sensitive. Or that one of his or her goals was to be funny. Or that she’s mocking people. None of those in and of itself makes the article a “joke” or a “farce.” Something can be both humorous, caustic, and insightful at the same time.

And the CDC gives statistics that are in line with the article in the OP.

Those figures do seem off, unless they were only considering childhood rates (not that unlikely, given the context).

No, it’s not obvious. For one, it’s not a work of dramatic fiction. Also, it’s possible to present valid ideas and theories using humor. Doing so doesn’t make the message false, it just makes it funny.

Also, note that none of the points you raised or statistics you cited are relevant to the OP, or the article’s hypothesis.

10

skutir google Temple Grandin – she exists and the hug box exists. I don’t know why you think that the descriptions of the kids’s behaviour is exaggerated for comic effect. As the parent of 2 kids dx’ed on the spectrum, there were really familiar themes in there. Doesn’t come across as even remotely farcical to me. Come and spend a week in my home.

The photos are faked for sure. Those kids look too engaged with life to me.

And there would be no point in expecting childhood rates to be different to adult rates. Autism is a lifelong neurological condition which doesn’t go away.

11

the hug box is real, but the hug-box/cubicle design is obviously a joke.

12

Autism seems to be increasing at a rate that I don’t think computer dating can account for. Also, the fact that people are socially unskilled wouldn’t necessarily make them ‘carriers’ for autism. The genetic component could be tied to something completely unrelated, couldn’t it?

13

The name of the journalist does not appear, nor does a single source appear that isn’t a made up name. There’s no reason to believe that “Molly McButter” exists, and there’s no reason to change the name of the only source for the article. Mentioning a real person does not make that person a source for the article.

14

Not a crazy thought, in a more general concept.

First off incidence.

Depends on who you believe and how you define and how you case find. Problem is that autism is not a clear either/or entity. It is part of a spectrum of disorders - the autistic spectrum disorders. Where you draw the line matters. More on that later. One in 500 is an upper estimate, one in 2000 more standard.

Genetics:

Large genetic component, probably greater than 90%. But not just one gene. Maybe three, maybe as many as fifteen different interacting genes. We know that sibs of autistic children have a greater than 50X greater chance of having autism than the general population (3% to 6%), that fraternal twins have no increased rate than other sibs but that identical twins have a 60% concordance rate. There is a rapid fall off for more distant relations. These facts are what provides the basis for those estimates. No single gene is a cause - autistism is a common end phenotype of multiple etiologies in a complex system. Future research must address why this is such an “attractor basin” for perturbations of the systems of neural networks that is the human brain.

Broad autistic phenotype:

Relatives of autistic children, who do not have the label of autism themseves, are statistically more likely to share features of a broad autistic phenotype: speech/language problems; impulsive, shy, aloof, eccentric. They are more likely to include engineers and others who make their living in math and programming related feilds.

Is there more autism that in years past?

Certainly more diagnosed. Could be a real increase, maybe not. Some can be increased case finding and a broader defintion. We docs look for it now because we have become convinced that early identification can lead to better remediation. Give me a good intervention to offer and I’ll do a good job finding who needs it. Consequently kids are labelled as having autism today at age two that never would have been so labelled a decade ago. Kids with the label are elgible for more services. Services that we are convinced make a difference.

Assuming a true increase, is there any reasonableness to the implied hypothesis of the op?

Yes. In today’s tech-happy world many socially awkward eccentric boys and girls (who would have been shy social outcasts with poor economic prospects a few decades ago) are meeting each other on the job and elsewhere and are considered desirable mates on the basis of economic success and shared interests. These members of a group that includes those who may have that broad autistic phenotype, each with one or the other of those independently interacting genes, are mating with each other in numbers previously unheard of. Match.com wouldn’t be the cause, but it would be one example of how such occurs more commonly in today’s world than in times past.

I don’t know if there is more autism or not, but if there is, then this hypothesis is as attractive of an explanation as any other out there. Better than many others that get more press.

15

They relate to the article’s credibility. You’ve been wooshed.

16

skutir can you expand on just why you think we’ve been whooshed? What exactly about the description of the kids with autism is so wrong? Could you describe a ‘typical’ kid with autism and what their behaviours would look like?

I’ve already conceded those photos to me just look like random photos of kids having tantrums. I don’t know why Molly McButter didn’t use her real name – most paeds would.

But the essence of that article is pretty accurate. I’m interested to hear more about what you know about children with autism and how they behave.

17

sounds like the match.com thing is a joke. but some people contend that the increase in autism is directly related to the increase in the number of vaccines administered to infants, and the fact that until very recently most such vaccines used a mercury-based preservative. they argue that any one vaccine might be safe, but that taken together they can cause mercury poisoning, the impact of which on the nervous system is apparently similar to some varieties of autism.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/03/02_354.html

18

It’s not the kids who are the problem, it’s their descriptions. No journalist would write comically about disabled children. Notice there is no author’s name or source for the article. Was it written for rotten.com? No. It must be from some journalism/newspaper,etc. No source is provided. Suspicious. So the author went to autism.org and did 10 seconds of homework, finding symptoms of autism to relate humorously on made-up children. Well, that hardly validates the story.

You should ask why the journalist would agree to change the identity of a supposed expert source. “Molly” doesn’t need to be protected from her reputation. No, The writer made Molly up and added the first line as cover. Notice that is impossible to verify anything in the story… You can’t track down either the author or the expert source.

I’m no expert on autism, but I do know BS when I see it. No author’s name, no journal or newspaper article, outrageous premise, questionable statistics, and a rather wandering theme to the story… from the opening profile of autistic behaviors to the hugbox/cubicle design, which I still insist is the best proof of the story’s inauthenticity.

If the article was about online dating among autistic people as a cause for autism, why wouldn’t the writer interview a single autistic parent? How about someone who is dating online? How about any parent of an autistic child who met their partner online? Why digress into futuristic hugbox/cubicles? Answer: because it’s an Onion-like parody, and the author was making it up as s/he went.

19

Er, probably “yes,” actually. The library section of their site has a whole bunch of original articles.

Some people who are apparently more knowledgable about autism then you or I don’t think it’s BS.

The hugbox is real. It’s not used as a cubicle, that part is a joke–an amusing one, I think.

But the article’s credibility doesn’t really matter to the OP. I asked three questions, which are directly relevant to the premise of the article. Answers to those questions could be used to discredit or verify the interesting points that the article raises without digging at the credibility of the authors. Facts are nice!

Do you have in-depth on-topic knowledge regarding those questions you can contribute?

20

I never said the hugbox is real, I am pointing out that the story is obviously a joke because of the hugbox/cubicle hybrid. Hilarious, right? But oh, the rest of the story is real! Even with fake names, staged photographs, and everything else.

What exactly are you asking? Yes, autism is genetic. Yes, disabled people meet online. 40,000,000 people use online dating, which is far more people than are autistic, so it’s completely possible that every single autistic person is mating with someone they met online and has produced (or will produce) one or more autisitic babies. I don’t know how many people are autistic, but obviously they can double their ranks in just a few years. Let’s form a Department of Eugenics and get on this. Your question is answered, Metacom. What else do you need to know?