And does autism boost learning? Much of learning involves communication. Science is a communal effort - even Newton learned from others. Einstein collaborated with leading mathematicians and the discoverers of DNA, Watson and Crick, co-operated together.
If Autism severely damages one's ability to communicate, how can they ever properly develop their mental abilities? Science does have its geniuses and lone inventors, but even they had to work together with other contemporaries to flesh out ideas or publish them or improve them. The Manhattan project was not the work of one man, after all. And indeed, science has become so damn complex these days, you NEED to work with others.
Take some of the work I used to do - I had to do a bioinformatics analysis on a gene to find areas that were conserved in order to locate potential splice-sites. Then I had to test whether or not the protein would bind and initiate splicing of its own pre-mRNA. There was a lot more to it than that, but that took months and months and months. And that was only one part of ONE gene, in one species (rat in this instance, but it was in Zebrafish and mice and humans as well). Much of my lab's work in understanding that gene came from other people, and we pooled our knowledge and findings together. Simply put, modern biology is FAR TOO COMPLEX for any ONE person to make significant discoveries. To make a discovery, you must work as a team. If you have mild Asperger's, that's not a problem. As I've said, when I was still in high-school, I was able to work with a kid with Aspergers on a physics project. We did fine. But if you have moderate-to-severe case of Autism, you'll have a lot of difficulty in being a modern-day scientist - you might never be able to work in science. It would definitely hinder you, that's for sure.
Science DEPENDS on communication, co-operation. It's a communal effort. And can I say, the vast majority of scientists I've encountered do not have autism, although one or two did. Autism doesn't mean you're stupid - but it certainly doesn't mean you're some kind of super-genius we "normies" must bow down to. And don't pretend some of you don't think that way - I've talked to more than a few autistic people to know that quite a few of you do. It's a psychological defence mechanism, I understand, but it's still silly.
And what exactly IS Asperger's? While it exists for sure, I think it is over-diagnosed. I myself was an awkward child in high-school, unable to make many friends - and I did have "difficulty" understanding the behaviour of some of my peers. I also found it difficult to talk to people or gauge their emotions at times. Did I have Asperger's? No, I was just socially awkward. And I grew out of it.
Of course, you can't "grow out of" real Asperger's, which I am at pains to make clear, really does exist. But far too many people "self-diagnose" themselves with it. If a doctor diagnoses you with Asperger's syndrome, you probably do have it. But if you decided that you have it because you read a couple of symptoms on the web and can't ask a girl out, then you probably don't.
