had this up, attributed to Hans Asperger. It may not be a correct attribution, but I believe it should be absolute gospel for all educators and psychologists:
“It seems that for success in science and art a dash of autism is essential. For all we know, the first tools on earth might have been developed by a loner sitting at the back of the cave, chipping at thousands of rocks to find the one that made the sharpest spear, while the neurotypicals chattered away in the firelight. Perhaps certain arcane systems of logic, mathematics, music, and stories - particularly remote and fantastic ones - have been passed down from phenotype to phenotype, in parallel with the DNA that helped shape minds which would know exactly what to do with these strange and elegant creations.
It may be that autistic people are essentially different from neurotypicals and that it is precisely those differences that make them invaluable to the ongoing evolution of the human race. If we could eliminate the genes for things like autism, I think it would be disastrous - the healthiest state for a gene pool is maximum diversity of things that might be good.”
It's nice to meet a like-mind, even across the years. (And that's a reference to/from Will Durant!)
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