Autism accuracy
Centre d’Excellence en Troubles Envahissants du D茅veloppement, University of Montreal
I appreciate the premise underlying David Wolman’s welcome feature about the advantages of autism (1 May, p 32). However, the careful, accurate reporting that this subject deserves is sometimes lacking.
For example, our 2007 study using the Raven’s Progressive Matrices neither cited from published epidemiology, nor found using any test, Wolman’s unreferenced claim that three-quarters of autistics score in the range of mental retardation. Wolman paints autistics as having weak central coherence, but findings to the contrary have proliferated, including in studies by researchers Wolman highlights. In 2006 we reported that autistics superior at seeing the trees, so to speak, were also superior at seeing the forest ().
Careful reading of the scientific literature reveals that autistics are far more complex and interesting, in our strengths and weaknesses, than allowed for by prevailing rigid, repetitive, stereotyped clich茅s 鈥� some of which inexplicably mar Wolman’s article.
Wolman also wrongly places my research in the context of an ideological and political movement 鈥� “autistic pride” 鈥� whose leaders have tended to frown on what I do. My work is better understood as applying basic standards of science and ethics to produce accurate information about autistics, which may lead to better, rather than worse, decisions about our future.
My colleague Tyler Cowen calls Wolman’s article “a case study in the cognitive biases of non-autistics”. Such biases are fascinating and worthy of study. But I’m far from the only autistic who has been harmed by inaccurate information and misrepresentations. Finding more of the same within a potentially ground-breaking article is discouraging. Autistics and non-autistics deserve better.
I found Wolman’s article on developments in autistic research very interesting.
However, when discussing concerns over the undue emphasis placed on exceptional people on the autistic spectrum, his use of emotive language merely compounds the current unrealistic view of people with autism as all being savants and prodigies. In fact, there are some very ordinary people with autism out there. The thing is that no one would want to write an article about them 鈥� their lives are of no interest to anyone.
One such ordinary person is my older brother. He is autistic and lives in care, relying on other people to guide his daily activities. If funding is cut because of prevailing misconceptions of the autie advantage, it is people like him who will suffer.
The fact is that the autism umbrella encompasses those who must live in care as well as high-functioning non-neurotypical people. Either we have to reclassify those exceptional individuals, or the media needs to represent this condition in a more honest and balanced way.
Bristol, UK
I am autistic. Your article was absolutely right 鈥� I love precision. Where are we without it? I do get why people lie, I just like being accurate, so I have no need to lie and I have no time to live a lie.
Autism for me is the key to understanding the next phase in human evolution. Nature naturally shifts along autistic spectrums. Think of autistic people as the real X-Men 鈥� a shift away from Homo sapiens. Of course you have to have autism to see this properly, as autism is the key.
If I was to take you on a journey through the doors in my own autistic mind I could show you a field so complex your mind would probably drown before it came close to even penetrating the surface. I am, to sum up, a more finely tuned creature.
London, UK
Complex pharma
Thank you for the report by Peter Aldhous, Jim Giles and Brad Stenger on Pfizer’s payments to censured doctors (1 May, p 8). It provided yet more evidence of the complex and controversial relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry.
Doctors come into contact with drug manufacturers on a daily basis. After all, we need their products to treat our patients. However, we must not forgot that it is a doctor’s vocation to save lives and treat illnesses, whereas pharmaceutical companies, although with the same principles at their core, are there to make money.
There are not many wonder drugs still to be discovered, and new pharmaceutical developments are usually more about improving quality of life than saving lives. Often the biomedical companies’ latest product is just the same old pill in a new package, so they need to spend billions of dollars on marketing, advertising and lobbying to ensure sales.
The controversy surrounding Big Pharma includes accusations of unethical behaviour at every stage of marketing their products: from not reporting poor trial results, through heavy advertising in medical journals, to sponsorship of educational events for healthcare professionals, not to mention disease-mongering.
An interesting insider’s view has been provided by Daniel Carlat, who used to be a speaker for Wyeth, a manufacturer of an antidepressant (). This was an eye-opener for me. Since reading it, I no longer meet drug reps, carefully choose which educational events I attend and check the “Conflict of Interest” section before reading articles in medical journals.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Cued up
Stephen Ornes reports on Rick Mabry’s research into the difficulties of certain pool shots and his finding that the hardest shot is when the distance between the cue ball and object ball is 1.618 times that between the object ball and the pocket (8 May, p 34).
In my experience, the major source of error in pool comes when trying to hit the cue ball dead centre. The shooter is trying to hit a round cue ball with a round cue tip with an accuracy that is nearly impossible to achieve. It takes years to master the technique and most never do, which is why there are just a handful of pool champions. Of course, this error is absorbed when the object ball is close to a pocket.
Science and music
Your editorial conclusion that “we need to go beyond bizarre installations and amusing gizmos” (8 May, p 3) is totally justified by what appears in the accompanying “Art and science” special (p 43). That, however, is because Martin Kemp and Jonathan Keats seem unaware of the much broader art-science interactions taking place outside the visual arts fields in which they work.
The great gains from such collaborations can be as much in the experimental and creative processes themselves as in the physical artefacts which may result, often triggered by the exchange of metaphors which help catalyse the bridging chemistry. What is happening in the field of music-science collaborations is a good example. When the physiologist Denis Noble chose music as the sustained metaphor for his ground-breaking book The Music of Life: Biology beyond the genome, he found a language which is helping to liberate all manner of music-science interactions.
Another example is the Rambert Dance Company’s The Comedy of Change, a collaboration between Mark Baldwin, a choreographer, and Nicola Clayton, a dancer and professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge. Inspired by evolution and natural selection, it explores the behaviour of corvids, Clayton’s field of study.
Heated warnings
The dire warnings found on some relaxing aromatic candles, which excited Feedback’s derision (8 May), are far from unusual. I spent last weekend in a holiday home equipped with a wood-burning stove that was able to consume 2 cubic feet of logs in an hour 鈥� yet the building handbook imposes a blanket ban on candles inside the property.
The only major candle-related accident that has occurred in my circle of friends came about when a nylon parachute was used to drape a candlelit room at a party. The result was a disastrous, lightning-fast, dripping-molten-plastic house fire. Sometimes people do need those nanny-style warnings.
Hansom zebra
Henry Nicholls states in his article on taming animals that the zebra is a “stubborn beast, one that has thwarted all efforts to domesticate it” (3 October 2009, p 40).
However, Walter Rothschild had a team of tame zebras at his Tring Park estate in Hertfordshire, UK, and was often seen driving a zebra-drawn carriage in the 1890s. Reportedly, he was also spotted driving down Pall Mall in London in a zebra and trap. There is a photograph of him in a zebra-drawn carriage on the Natural History Museum’s website ().
Determined pun
My eyebrows shot up on reading correspondence from Jack Wretch on the subject of Morning Chicness bags for expectant mothers (Feedback, 1 May). Are we in a new phase of nominative determinism?
For the record
鈥� We ascribed “superlative hardness” to gold and silver in our article on precious materials in electronics when in fact we meant diamonds (24 April, p 28).
鈥� Japan’s AKATKUSI Venus Orbiter is not the country’s first interplanetary spacecraft (15 May, p 10). It would be the first to successfully reach another planet, as the first Japanese interplanetary probe launched, Nozomi, never reached its destination.
鈥� Strictly speaking there is no Nobel economics prize. It is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that Ernst Fehr is in line for (1 May, p 26).
鈥� NRG-1 has never been sold as an appetite suppressant, but it is a novel synthetic analogue of pyrovalerone, which has (24 April, p 3).