Fathers may soon have just cause to sue the mothers of their autistic children...

hey burritos - can you link directly to the article? I couldn't find it on the reference page you linked to...

Thanks!

 

holy crap. western blots with straight up human serum. i'd hate to have to sort the background out of THAT.

Antibodies against fetal brain in sera of mothers ...[J Neuroimmunol. 2007] - PubMed Result

one more interesting piece of the puzzle...

i wonder how effective the antibodies were at neutralizing the protein... what other immune responses occurred at the site of ab binding... and whether all that caused an upregulation of protein expression in response to the productive protein being taken out of the picture.

lots of questions...

 

A link between autism and antibodies crossing from the mother to the fetus is hardly a "just cause" for a lawsuit. You really ought to title your threads a bit less sensationalistically.

 

Can a child sue their parents for genetic diseases?

 

Thanks Burrito's... that certainly is an interesting article. I'll be forwarding it on to my sister (she's graduating this year with a degree in psychology, and is going to be working with autistic children).

FWIW, i doubt this is really a natural problem. Just think about it... would nature have 1 in 150 kids born be born in such a way that they're socially deficient, when our very race has evolved to be socially dependent for just about everything? (i'm talking about way back in the day when we played with sticks and lived in trees in Africa or wherever) I'd much sooner believe that there are some environmental factors (pollution? over-crowding? radiation?) that are causing mothers to produce these antibodies, or causing the placenta to allow them through to the fetus, or whatever. That sad part is that we may never know the true root cause, and in fact we might stop looking once we find a way to prevent it.

 

I also have a Psych degree, have worked with autistic kids, and have another friend who works with them at a company that provides "counseling/teaching" to autistic kids about 5-10 years old. Probably a third of the kids could be "normal" if the parents gave a damn. Sort of the same as ADHD. Many cases are really poor parenting practices.
As for the cause of the autism that the rest of them have legitamately, who knows? If it is the thimerasol, then what? No vaccines? It would kill more children to not have them. Spend more for them to eliminate the thimerasol? We don't know the more expensive ones are any safer, and we DO know that healthcare costs have to be contained somehow. There are no easy answers here. I've cringed everytime my kids have gotten shots. You have no control. If you just decline, your kids can suffer just as bad, or you can be deemed a bad parent if something happens. You just cross your fingers and hope.

Anyways, the "iffy" autism cases I hear about from my friends are really frustrating. Once the parent gets that magic diagnosis, they get free childcare at the expense of the medical insurance companies through these services. (Yet another reason for rising health care costs). These are largely single mothers, barely able to cope with their own life, let alone properly care for their children. She tells me stories about some of the mothers arguing over taking their kids home. "You're child is sick and you need to take them home" and they yell at them that they can't or won't and that they need to take care of them. It's a really sad situation for all of them involved. The poor kids, the counselers who are taking care of them at our expense, and the mother, who can't afford rent and depends on that free child care to go to work.

 

well, i don't think too many people with autism grow up to reproduce. that is the marker of evolutionary success, isn't it?

at any rate... it's also an issue of compatibility of parental immune systems IMO... maybe in some way parallel to the rh factor but in a very select population under very select conditions?

 

or inbreeding

 

In the "natural" state natural selection would eliminate such cases from the gene pool. However, "civilization" allows individuals to survive who would otherwise die. Natural selection works when there is survival pressure. Modern medicine, sanitation, agriculture, allow virtually everyone to survive, and natural selection is effectively put on hold until there is once again survival pressure.

I am not arguing against civilization. Just pointing out that when there is abundant food and everyone can have as many kids as they like, the normal processes of evolution are blocked and disadvantageous genes can increase their proportion in the population.

Sooner or later the energy will run out, the economy will collapse, civilization will crumble, there will be mass starvation, the population will collapse, and competition for scarce resources will once again allow evolution by natural selection to operate.

 

i am glad to hear that. i must have been working with the most severe cases when i was in school. what i remember of autism was that they could be absolutely brilliant, but had an extremely difficult time communicating with the outside world. it must be that i was interacting with the very severe cases who had an especially hard time communicating and needed to be in a special program to help develop some of those skills. that program really made an impression on me, i guess.

i would say though, that you have to balance the incredible intelligence against the ability to share it. you would hope someone that brilliant would become a physician or a medical researcher and work toward improving our society, but both of those and many other professions that involve such intelligence require a better than average ability to communicate with others.

we all know that in the real world (ie, not the fantasy world that tv and movies show us), relationships all take a lot of work and a lot of communication to keep going. that's why i had my doubts initially about whether people with autism did get married.

 

Selection pressure is indeed greater in desperately poor countries. But even there, civilization (culture, economics) outweighs genes in determining who survives and who does not.

I am a believer in the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which asserts that evolution occurs in very small reproductively-isolated populations. Third world countries do not meet this criteria: populations are too large, and there is still reproductive contact with the rest of the world.

And even in the theory of punctuated equilibrium, the "punctuations" occur over time spans that are extremely long in human history terms. So, no, third-world populations are not evolving into separate sepcies from first-world populations.

 

Excuse my blunt language, but that is a silly question! There is no "end-all" phenotype. As long as conditions on Earth permit life, life will continue to evolve. We like to think of ourselves as the crowning accomplishment of evolution (or the crowning creation of god, for those who believe in one) but we are merely one species at one moment in time. Evolution is a process. It has no "purpose," goal, or direction. We may render the Earth uninhabitable to ourselves, but we cannot exterminate all life, and there are several billion years before the sun becomes a nova and envelopes and destroys the Earth. So there is much yet to come.

 

Not sure I'm understanding this correctly. Our understanding of self awareness is weak. It's not entirely clear that it is neccesary. A lot of critters don't noticably have it, do just fine. Intelligence has proven useful to us, but we have not withstood the test of time, so the jury is still out on that one. The current human phenotype could easily be improved by any second year med student, our anatomy is pretty kludged up.