Also links to the “Ghost In Your Genes” homepage–NOVA, which further discusses epigenetics.

Genetics is so complicated and so new, that if you look hard enough, you can find genetic differences between any two individuals, even identical twins.

It is not possible to tell if the differences you observe are cause, effect or unrelated to any phenotype differences between those identical twins.

It isn’t just autism that has complicated genetics. Diabetes, obesity, heart disease, hypertension, etc. all have “complex” genetics.

To me, traits resulting from “complex” genetics have to be “complex” and under “complex” control to do “complex” things. I think it is likely that some of those “complex” things might be good and some might be bad depending on the “complex” environment the “complex” organism develops in. Because physiology is inherently non-linear and coupled, it is inherently chaotic and very complex results can occur due to very simple and modest changes.

‘Autism’ has always come under the domain of child psychiatry. Kanner was heavily influenced by the psychiatric opinion of his day which embraced Feudian theory and psychodynamics leading to the concept of the refrigerator mother.

Psychiatry has abandoned this belief at least with respect to the study of ‘autism’. The discovery of DNA and the human genome brought about a change in current thinking in psychiatry and the new opinion has embraced behavioral genetics as the Rosetta Stone that once it is decoded will lead to the understanding of all human behaviors. The leading proponents of the polygenic model are all on record as stating they just don’t see an environmental component.

Autism is no more complicated under current beliefs in behavioral genetics than it was under the psychodynamic beliefs of 40 years ago

That is why the genetics of autism is no less complex than the genetics that insures that no too people are ever entirely alike. There are genes no doubt that predispose to a good banjo player, but without a banjo who would ever know?

Hehe

- pD

The way things connect is like the way an artist paints from a particular pallete, essentially the artist can’t use any more materials than are there, but there is going to be a strict mathematical formula of immense complexity that will determine the probabilities of each paint stroke and colour mix.

The properties of those colours, or components or whatever other analogy are going to be governed by physical properties inherent to there atomic structure at a pre molecular level.

That is what I mean by complexity. Silicon acts the way it does not because it is chosen to make computer chips from, but because of the properties inherent to silicon. Copper shows a green spectrum not because it is used in the paint box to signify green, but because that is what copper does.

Genes can’t determine ultimately what happens, they can only set a few switches, and the rest procedes because of the physical properties of the outcome of that, and the complexity of the interaction of everything else.

That is why the genetics of autism is no less complex than the genetics that insures that no too people are ever entirely alike. There are genes no doubt that predispose to a good banjo player, but without a banjo who would ever know?