You are literally holding her to a higher standard than you are holding the article because she has an autistic child instead of a book to sell.

This suggests to me that Willingham was frantically googling anywhere she could in order to create a point-by-point retraction of the original opinion piece. So yes, I think she’s the less trustworthy source, here, and that she was reacting emotionally. Citing a single case of a possibly autistic child as “proof” is not evidence of strong scientific reasoning. If she’d said, “This is an interesting argument, but it’s unlikely, and here’s why,” I’d have trusted her reasoning a lot more.

I’m not saying that we should assume that kids diagnosed with Asperger’s or autism are “just being dicks,” but perhaps when you run into someone who seems to be an insensitive jerk, you might consider he just doesn’t see things the same as you?

Reminds me of a documentary I saw on Mark E. Smith, wherein someone who knew him was describing his behavior to a psychiatrist friend, who responded that he was describing textbook case of schizophrenia – then the man added that Smith had recorded over forty albums and successfully managed an income stream from a series of bands, and the psychiatrist immediately recanted, saying that, by definition, no schizophrenic can be that successful. 
Similarly, there are people, who definitely fit most of the definitions of Asperger’s or somewhere on the autism spectrum, but they’re too successful to actually get a diagnosis.

If you meet and spend time with kids in the mild/moderate part of the spectrum, you gain a much clearer understanding of Asperger’s; I think it’s harder to see the line when you start from the fat part of the bell curve.

And, no, this isn’t like the ‘Pirates cause global warming’ correlation .. there’s a nice paper in ‘Nature’ on the subject.  The cause in those cases seems to be an increased rate of de novo mutations.

I don’t have a link to the study – but here’s a summary of some of the findings:  http://tools.medicine.yale.edu/sestan/www/Publications/sandersN12%20complete.pdf

The idea that people in populations with higher incidence of parasites would have zero incidence of autism is not proposed in the NYT piece where they suppose (without cited proof or evidence) that 1/3rd of the cases of autism are caused by some kind of misfiring maternal immune response.

I agree that the NYT piece glosses over the science.  

If you want the scholarly work on the topic of autism and immune dysfunction, it’s relatively easy to find.  And it’s plentiful.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=autism+and+maternal+immune+dysfunction&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=mRI8UKiSHIKGyQHXv4HAAg&ved=0CBoQgQMwAA 

I just think it’s an interesting idea…that we work better with some parasitism…or perhaps symbiosis?  

She’s the biased one, because autism.  

I didn’t take read article that way at all, because I have no personal horse in this race — but I can see why that would make her read the article in such a hostile way — and take from it a tone that seemed so different from the tone and spirit in which I read it. She’s certainly not an unbiased scientific observer of a study that traces autism to something that’s possibly preventable (at least in theory) in the mother.And for what it’s worth, it’s still obvious autism has genetic roots, of course. But perhaps the genetic roots involve a susceptibility to certain increasingly common conditions. Frankly, I think people are so used to the idea that “we don’t know what causes it” that a non-quack possible cause makes some people angry.

Even beyond your loaded use of the verb “pretends,” Rachel, this is simply incorrect.  As the mother of an autistic child, Willingham is hardly a partisan of the notion that autism is currently “overdiagnosed.” The word you’re looking for is not “overdiagnosis,” but “diagnosis.” 40 years ago, diagnostic categories like Asperger’s syndrome and PDD-NOS didn’t even exist in the DSM. In other words, the huge numbers of people who are now diagnosed with those conditions would have been misdiagnosed with something more like schizophrenia or neurosis. The role of those numbers in the overall “spike” in autism diagnoses is what people like Willingham and many others are talking about.

You can’t compare the two numbers. It’s like saying “Well, this census from 1920 says that 20% of the population were over 65, and this years census says 45% of the population are over 50! Oh god, there’s an epidemic of senior citizens!” Well, no. The two numbers aren’t comparable at all – the folks over 50 aren’t all senior citizens, the seniors are just a subset of that. You can’t tell if there’s more people alive over the age of 65 with that metric.

And the broader diagnosis is the only modern metric we have stats on.

You can’t claim epidemic based on no stats. That’s scaremongering, right up with yelling “FIRE” because I can’t prove there isn’t a fire.

Willingham’s basic argument was, “This guy isn’t sure he’s 100% correct but writes like he is!” Isn’t that what happens when anyone proposes any new big theory?

Um, actually, no. No, that’s not what happens when “anyone” proposes a new big theory. When a sane, sensible, scientist proposes a new big hypothesis, he says “I think it might be X but I’m probably wrong, because wow that’s a big jump. Can someone double check my numbers?”

This isn’t a theory yet.

Two “common examples” of what? The validity of the word “cure” in autism is hotly debated. It’s not a “common example” of anything — it’s a very idiosyncratic example of a condition diagnosed by subjective clinical observation, with no gold-standard biomarker, so yes, while many children “lose the diagnosis” over the years, that doesn’t mean that their underlying neurology has been transformed, as the word “cure” implies.

Willingham also blames the article for attitudes it doesn’t display, such as “blame the mother” (which it doesn’t) and “Let’s all put worms in our bodies!” which the article proposes as one intriguing possibility, but doesn’t necessarily advocate. The article certainly doesn’t embrace a fantasy-land in which people in Third World countries are actually healthier. I actually found Willingham’s attack on the article strangely defensive. Willingham’s basic argument was, “This guy isn’t sure he’s 100% correct but writes like he is!” Isn’t that what happens when anyone proposes any new big theory? 

For more information, see wormfreeworld.org.

Are you unable to use teh Google?

DBAD.  You made the claims, you’re responsible for supporting them.

On the “excess neuron” angle here is something from Scientific American, The Ballooning Brain: Defective Genes May Explain Uncontrolled Brain Growth in Autism, that contains a lot of references.