Michelle Dawson: belief

Transcript context

…And just to clarify, you’re saying the literature has shown that autistics are quite different from each other in their mutations? No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying autistics will be quite different from each other in . . . Those are two different issues: how autistics process information and the sort of genetics that may lead to brains that work like autistic brains. I’m not a genetics person. I do cognitive stuff. But I think the genetic stuff is really a cautionary note of leaping to conclusions that . . . For instance, you have these rare de novo variants that are the real big deal, and even looking for them in the most favorable circumstance possible — that is, you’re looking in families that only have one autistic person — they did not find much. But that was the leading story for a long time. The seesaw is back to common variants, and we are getting slightly more complicated views — that if you have a rare variant, that doesn’t mean you don’t also have common variants that contribute to how atypically your mind works. So it’s been this long slog, but it is a cautionary note against any simplistic explanation for autistic genetics. I think there has been some progress, but I do think we have real problems in where we’ve looked and how we’ve looked. Some of that mirrors what has happened generally in genetics. In percentage terms, is autism becoming more common or more frequent over time?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.