The purpose of this website is to provide material supplementary to the update review (not yet published) of the 1993-published autism theory paper (linked in header above). All the posts here serve that purpose in one way or another, but some are more worthwhile or necessary than others. So here is a brief guide to the contents here.

Click here to read discussion of whether there is a relationship of vaccines to autism.

"Skeptical" people will generate plenty of supposedly clever reasons for rejecting the whole basis of the antiinnatia theory. That's despite the fact that any such "skeptics" must therefore be instead gullibly taking seriously one of a handful of utterly absurd alternative theories as explained in the update paper.

An answer to one of these "skeptical" notions is this one about being supposedly impossible for mercury to get to the DNA. And this one about supposedly the history of Pink Disease (acrodynia) proving that mercury doesn't cause autism. But perhaps you're a sheep?

Autism research is now becoming seriously distorted by official charlatanism similar to that of which the proof is shown here. And that distortion directly affronts the truths to which this theory relates. One of the leading sources of extreme misinformation is the book by Paul Offit, which is being distributed free to parents of victims via the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The myths:

1. that there has been no autism increase,
2. that mercury is not associated with autism, and
3. that removal by chelation cannot help,

are all addressed in the articles linked above and therefrom (and more fully in conjunction with the update review paper).

Turning to less militarised corners of the autism research field, I'll first point out that theories are often not in conflict even when they superficially may appear to be.

And there is only one autistic/ASD/etc syndrome, not several or many "autisms".

You can find the link to the spectacularly-predicted Purgatorius video here, along with some further evidence relating to my explanation of the hand-flapping.

Some other peoples' excellent graphs of the increase in the US can be found here, particularly the ones with multiple differently-coloured curves. They basically confirm my interpretation of the California DDS data as essentially a simple exponential-shaped increase.

Here is a link to my comment on close-spaced pregnancy findings of Keely Cheslack-Postava, Kayuet Liu, and Peter S. Bearman.

I've added yet another amazing new prediction, that the Flynn Effect (rising IQs increase) affects non-human animals as well.

Mitochondrial dysfunctions could be caused by antiinnatia (both within and without the brain), or they could be a non-antiinnatia "side effect" of mercury toxication. They could be part of some processes whereby antiinnatia affects neuronal function. So the reports about mitochondria appear to give neither support nor challenge to antiinatia theory.

Data on a "photoninthedarkness" blog leads me now to thinking that the increase has involved some diagnostic substitution, but not in the way that is assumed by pro-vaxxers. More later, but I reckon when there was a rapid real increase of autism c. 1985-1995, much of it was incorrectly diagnosed as non-autistic retardation. Thereafter the diagnoses substituted to the correct autism diagnoses. This leads me to suspect that the autism increase actually stopped increasing about ten years ago and since then it's just been an artifact of substitution.

“We’re finding that the immune system seems to function at a lower level in autism,” says Hertz-Picciotto. Which could be because the dental mercury that caused the autism increase is well-known to also impair immune functioning.

July 2011: Powerful yet further evidence of mercury involvement in autism - 6-fold increased autism in children whose grandparents survived Pink Disease.

(I'll continue work on this intro menu in due course, so be sure to check back later.)

More advanced understanding of antiinnatia; this post is not for beginners here!

Don't start your reading here, first study the 1993 paper and the home page here.

It is mainly about concepts. Sound science cannot be founded on concepts alone, but science gets in a muddle if the concepts are not properly clarified. So this can be important.

The nature of the autistic syndrome.

An expression "the autistic spectrum" has become popularised. This is regrettable because it promotes a fallacy that autism variation is all or mostly on one dimension from mild to severe. A more reasonable concept is that autism, Aspergers, and related things such as dyslexia, are all part of the autistic syndrome, that is tendency to clustering together of certain characteristics. This clustering is many-dimensional, with the number of dimensions being equal(ish?) to the number of characteristics whose expression can be affected by antiinnatia. In practice, as generally found with factor analysis, there would be a smaller number of main/most important dimensions (such as predisposition to allocating attention to the behaviors of others), some mediumly important ones, and a lot of less important ones.

The inclusion of such things as dyslexia (or what might otherwise be called language disabilities) is warranted by the finding of these being found associated in twin studies, and their symptoms falling within the same theoretical framework of suppression of innatons.

The nature of antiinnatia factors

The 1993 paper indicated that both environmental and genetic factors would be antiinnatia factors. We might add that perhaps epigenetic, genomic imprinting or mitochondrial factors could also have antiinnatia effect.

In any case, there is no reason to suppose a yes/no distinction between variables that are antiinnatia factors and those that are not. Instead, like autism itself it is a matter of degree with no clear cutoff.

And one would expect some antiinnatia factors to be "purer" (more non-specific) than others. This can arguably be seen in the social class differential graphs of my 1993 paper (graphs of table 1 added in author's reprint). The "pure" would be due to the purer antiinnatia, while the "complicated"/"organic" would be due to the less pure causing what we might call side-effects. (I discussed this variable purity of antiinnatia factors already in the 1993 paper itself.)

The numerous antiinnatia genes in combination would act as a relatively pure, general antiinatia factor, even though any one of those genes taken in isolation might have some idiosyncratic side-effects.

One would expect some grossly injurious process such as an untimely bash on the head, or a severe infective brain inflammation of viral encephalitis would have substantial side effects.

I would reckon that mercury, while a relatively pure antiinnatia factor, would be less pure than the 'portfolio' of antiinnatia genes, due to its interference with thiol-dependend enzymes, and its tendency to generate oxidative stress.

One can then go on to reasonably expect that there would be some other factors which have more or less of antiinnatia factor effect. And obviously any gene specifically related to language function is going to tend to be a factor in suppression of at least language function, and hence favour outcomes with a bit of resemblance to autism even though arguably not properly considered a true antiinnatia factor.

Increasing support for the handflapping explanation

When working up the details of the antiinnatia theory, it very soon became apparent that some features of autism could not be credibly explained as due to simply loss of innatons. This led me to think of the idea of prehuman innnatons being suppressed by later suppressing characteristics, and indeed I thereafter learnt that this concept was already well-established and called atavisms. I explained the handflapping and posturing as a re-emergence of the sort of behaviour regularly seen in wild rats, squirrels and birds in the wild. Fuller details are in the 1993 paper.

Nowadays with the internet it is vastly easier to research things than it was back in the 1980s and 90s. I have now learnt that we did indeed have a rat-like prehuman ancestor, for 163 million years! As indicated in this video of your granny (which be warned is rather 'exciting' by the way):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0iSf4yISDA
same as at:
http://animal.discovery.com/videos/animal-armageddon-purgatorius.html
P.S.: The palaeontologists have not presented a very accurate image of the rat-like behaviour here. Just watch any squirrel or bird (in the wild) to see what I actually had in mind, and which surely would have applied as a defence against dinosaurs.

Meanwhile, in this charming video, eight-year-old Anthony seeks to describe his (and others') stimming (by which he basically means handflapping episodes). Note that he emphasises that it is liable to involve getting up and moving forward, which rather agrees with my theory's explanation of the handflapping as an atavism of the rat-like behaviour of our ancestors, as per Purgatorius video above. The point being that this shows some remaining trace of (hind) legs movements and forward movements as per the original function of the hypothesised innatons. Note in my 1993-published paper my explicit assumption that the handflapping did not have any related leg movements (because I was only going on the information I had at that time).
I should add that Anthony's attempted simulation of hand-movements does not correspond very well with actual videos of handflapping, which do indeed look suggestive of the rats' sprinting movements. For instance you can see (at 1.56) in this video of the Minamata disaster a more typical example of autistic handflapping, in this case seemingly caused by the mercury from the Minamata pollution (so best pretend you've not noticed it if you work for the FDA, CDC, NHS etc). And immediate before that you can see a cat doing something remarkably similar.

Causes of autism - update of unchallenged theory

This is a website relating to the unchallenged theory of autism, IQ and genius (the antiinnatia theory). An update review paper is being prepared for publication. Meanwhile you can download the original 1993 publication here . Be sure to print it out rather than trying to read on screen.

I cannot put the update paper on a website before it has been accepted by a journal. But in the interim I can send you a copy by email if you email a request for it to rpclarke [at] autismcauses[dot]info .