Shaner Andrew, Miller Geoffrey, Mintz Jim
Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health (116A), Veterans Affairs Healthcare System and the University of California Los Angeles, 11301 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, 90073, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-1161, USA.
Hum Nat. 2008 Dec;19(4):389-413. doi: 10.1007/s12110-008-9049-x.
Siblings compete for parental care and feeding, while parents must allocate scarce resources to those offspring most likely to survive and reproduce. This could cause offspring to evolve traits that advertise health, and thereby attract parental resources. For example, experimental evidence suggests that bright orange filaments covering the heads of North American coot chicks may have evolved for this fitness-advertising purpose. Could any human mental disorders be the equivalent of dull filaments in coot chicks-low-fitness extremes of mental abilities that evolved as fitness indicators? One possibility is autism. Suppose that the ability of very young children to charm their parents evolved as a parentally selected fitness indicator. Young children would vary greatly in their ability to charm parents, that variation would correlate with underlying fitness, and autism could be the low-fitness extreme of this variation. This view explains many seemingly disparate facts about autism and leads to some surprising and testable predictions.
兄弟姐妹会争夺父母的照料和喂养，而父母必须将稀缺资源分配给那些最有可能存活和繁殖的后代。这可能会促使后代进化出能彰显健康的特征，从而吸引父母的资源。例如，实验证据表明，覆盖在北美白骨顶鸡雏鸟头部的亮橙色细丝可能就是为了这个适应度宣传目的而进化出来的。人类的某些精神障碍是否等同于白骨顶鸡雏鸟暗淡的细丝——作为适应度指标而进化出的低适应度极端精神能力呢？一种可能性是自闭症。假设幼儿取悦父母的能力是作为一种由父母选择的适应度指标而进化出来的。幼儿在取悦父母的能力上会有很大差异，这种差异会与潜在的适应度相关，而自闭症可能就是这种差异的低适应度极端情况。这种观点解释了许多关于自闭症看似毫不相干的事实，并引出了一些令人惊讶且可检验的预测。
