Science

Harvard Research Links Creativity and Cheating
By Jared T. Lucky, CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Published: Thursday, December 01, 2011

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/12/1/creativity-study-cheating-link/

Beinig able to go around the rule, thinking out of box, are quite similar to cheating behavior. It does make sence.

Two types of winners in any competition, pure strengh who do not need to cheat, creativity who cheats its way to success.

The following quote is from blog

http://hubpages.com/hub/Three-Most-Successful-Rifles

The first candidate is the outstanding rifles chambered for the 303 British Round. The rifle came out in 1887 and adopted in 1888. It was invented by James Paris Lee an American, incidentally. Originally loaded with black powder they switched to smokeless and a pointed bullet using Cordite powder. The one used the most was a 174 grain flat base bullet at about 2400 FPS. Cordite powder was used for many years in the 303 as well as British sporting arms. The rifle saw use in both WWl and WWll not to mention many other smaller wars and skirmishes. It is popular in many of the former British colonies including Canada and Australia. As a military rifle it had few peers. It was powerful enough for the job at hand and reliable. It cocks on closing which is liked by some because it would help a little in getting a stubborn round out of the chamber. It also was capable of rapid fire for a bolt action a desirable feature during war time. It has provisions for escaping gas in the unlikely event of a case rupture. Many of them have oversize chambers which was done on purpose to be able to chamber and fire dirty or deformed ammo. That causes case separation especially when handloading. To counteract that problem set your sizing die to just enough sizing to where it will fit in the chamber. Accuracy can be outstanding in one that is in good shape. They have a two piece stock which is disliked by some. Another plus is that they are readily available and fairly inexpensive unless it an odd model. The MK 4 which was brought out in the 1930’s was a stronger and simpler version of the older models. The fact that it was used by the Brits for 70 years would indicate that it is a strong and reliable rifle. Since they were used until 1957 there are a lot of variations out there. The ammo for it is still relatively available and brass is sold at various locations. The bullet is a 311 diameter which can be found easily. Since it is a rimmed cartridge it might turn off some folks but it functioned with great reliability in the weapons it was designed for. The magazine protrudes below the stock which might make it more difficult for a hunter to carry though the balance is forward of magazine. The 303 round loaded with a good hunting bullet is capable of taking most big game animals out there. Some folks compare it to the 30-40 Krag but due to higher loading pressures it will out do its American competitor. The Krag was commonly loaded to 40,000 PSI while The 303 rifles were designed for pressures of 45 to 48,000 PSI though some of the newer ones were chambered for the 308 which can go to 62,000 PSI which would suggest that it was a strong rifle. At one time it was chambered in a few sporting a rifle such as the Winchester model 95 but that is no longer true. No one to my knowledge makes a clone of the Lee Enfield rifle today. It can be sporterized to an extent but it might not be worth the dollars required to make that happen. That is something that the owner would have to determine. You can mount a scope with a side mount which will enhance it accuracy and with a good barrel it may very well be worth the bucks. Adding a sporter stock would enhance it looks if that’s important to you.

The highlighted explains many reliable weapons in the field.

AK47 is very reliable also even without need for cleaning. Its tapered shells and chamber functioned just like oversized chamber to prevent jamming.

Ivars Peterson

You probably know the drill. You have 75 minutes to answer 60 math questions. The first set of 25 multiple-choice questions must be completed in 30 minutes.


There are 20 packages of bagels on a shelf in a store and each package contains the same number of bagels. If 3 of these packages contain a total of 18 bagels, how many bagels are there in 7 of these packages?

(A) 21 (B) 36 (C) 40 (D) 42 (E) 49

That's what a college-bound student faces in taking the ubiquitous SAT I: Reasoning Test.

The official SAT handbook notes that the speed with which students answer the questions should play, at most, a minor role in deciding the scores. Many students, however, believe that, if they had extra time, they would do significantly better. And some students do apply for an extension, generally citing learning or physical disabilities.

Now, a team of statisticians has tackled the question of which students appear to benefit most from additional time on the SAT. Reporting in the current issue of Chance, the researchers conclude that the students who benefit most on the math half of the SAT are those who are most able.

"When able examinees are given extra time in mathematics, they can improve their scores: the more able, the greater the improvement," Howard Wainer of the National Board of Medical Examiners and his colleagues wrote.

Wainer collaborated with Brent Bridgeman, Michelle Najarian and Catherine Trapani of Educational Testing Services in Princeton, N.J., to conduct the study to examine the extent to which extra time affects SAT scores.

Data for the study came from the SAT administered in October 2000. Each form of the SAT has three math sections, three verbal sections, and one special section that is used for various other purposes and is not scored as part of the test. For the study, a random sample of about 100,000 test-takers were divided into 10 groups, with each group getting a different, specially constructed set of questions in the experimental section.

In effect, the researchers could compare performance on standard-length test sections with performance on test sections that were 14 percent, 25 percent, and 47 percent shorter.

Interestingly, analyses of the results showed that extra time had a statistically significant impact on math scores, but there were no significant trends revealed in the verbal portion.

Moreover, "more time yields higher scores and the greatest benefits accrue to the highest performing examinees," Wainer and his colleagues noted. "Gains of almost 35 points are expected for high-scoring examinees if they are given 50 percent more time."

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that "items toward the end of the test are more likely to be answered correctly than they are when time is in shorter supply."

On the verbal portion of the test, time did not appear to play any role in which questions were answered correctly.

In general, "sometimes higher ability examinees do better with extra time, but sometimes they do worse," the researchers said. Overall, more time doesn't help.

On the other hand, math scores are clearly affected by the time available. "When such tests are administered with extra time, the scores obtained cannot be interpreted in the same way as tests administered with the standard time allocation," Wainer and his colleagues concluded.



References:

Bridgeman, B. 2004. Speededness as a threat to construct validity. Annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education. April 13-15. San Diego, Calif. Available at http://www.ets.org/research/dload/NCME_2004-Bridgeman.pdf

Bridgeman, B., C. Trapani, and E. Curley. In press. Impact of fewer questions per section on SAT I scores. Journal of Educational Measurement. See http://www.ets.org/research/dload/RIBRR-03-08.pdf.

Wainer, H., et al. 2004. How much does extra time on the SAT help? Chance 17(Spring):19-24.

For additional information about the SAT, go to http://www.collegeboard.com/testing/.

**********
A collection of Ivars Peterson's early MathTrek articles, updated and illustrated, is now available as the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) book Mathematical Treks: From Surreal Numbers to Magic Circles. See http://www.maa.org/pubs/books/mtr.html.



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Comments are welcome. Please send messages to Ivars Peterson at ip@sciserv.org.
Ivars Peterson is the mathematics/computer writer and online editor at Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org). He is the author of The Mathematical Tourist, Islands of Truth, Newton's Clock, Fatal Defect, and The Jungles of Randomness. He also writes for the children's magazine Muse (http://www.musemag.com) and is working on a book about math and art.

long-lost brother and fall passionately in love. This isn't fiction; in the age of the sperm donor, it's a growing reality: 50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions. Last month, a former police officer was convicted of incest with his half-sister - but should we criminalise a bond hardwired into our psychology? Alix Kirsta talks to those who have suffered the torment of 'genetic sexual attraction'

Saturday May 17, 2003
The Guardian

At first, Ivor Lytton's emotional predicament seems unremarkable, no different from the woes that make up any agony aunt's weekly column. On Sunday October 4 1998, Lytton, an Edinburgh public relations consultant, met the love of his life. The meeting took place at a dinner party at a fashionable country inn. Rita Meadows, who lives in South Africa, was on holiday in Scotland. Describing their meeting, Lytton's words overflow with sentiment. "From the moment we met, I was smitten, and continued to be drawn to her like a magnet. As I got to know her, I felt she had given me a life transmission. She put a smile in my heart and a spring in my step." Each October for the past four years, he has sent her a card to commemorate the date of their meeting.
What Lytton didn't know was that the consequences of that love would plunge him into the most devastating crisis of his life. "To say that I have been to hell and back wouldn't be accurate. The situation is far worse than that." On the surface, his ordeal seems a classic case of unrequited love. Despite forming a warm friendship with Lytton, and meeting him several times a year either abroad or in Britain, Meadows, a divorcee, has never shared his feelings. Irritated and, at times, angry with his outpourings of affection, she recently emailed him curtly to think of her as "just a casual friend". Unable to reconcile himself to her indifference, Lytton's subsequent depression and sense of rejection, and the continuing compulsion to declare his feelings, are no different from the irrational fixation and emotions that mark any young adult's first major infatuation. But that is as far as the Mills & Boon scenario goes.

In the circumstances, Lytton's new-found love was doomed to be a nonstarter. He is a married man of 66, semi-retired, with grown-up children and grandchildren. The story might be relatively straightforward, and there may even have been a happy ending of sorts had he merely fallen for a woman half his age or abandoned his family to start a new life in another country. Instead, his love for Meadows represents society's most abhorrent taboo. She is his younger sister, adopted as a baby shortly after the death of their mother from an illness contracted after the birth, when Lytton was two. Although Meadows had no idea she had a brother, Lytton, who was raised by his stepmother after his father's death during the second world war, had always known of her existence, but waited until 1995 to begin searching for her. The 1998 party at which they met had been organised by Lytton, with the help of his wife and children, as a celebratory reunion after he had tracked down his 60-year-old sister in Durban.

"I knew Rita was my sister," he says now. "I didn't choose to fall in love with her, or expect to feel sexual desire. It just happened. Even in front of my wife, I made no attempt to hide my adoration, I just buzzed whenever she was around. It was as if no one else existed. The two biggest mistakes I made were deluding myself that I could become all-important in her life, a brother and a surrogate lover, even though she didn't desire me, and then believing I could control and resolve the problem by myself."

When we met, Lytton brought with him several large files bulging with four years' correspondence, mainly email printouts, to and from Rita. A tall, white-haired and articulate man, he has recorded every emotion, thought and incident involving his sister since their reunion. Photographs taken on his trips to South Africa, and on her visits to Scotland, show a vivacious and elegant redhead, seemingly little older than 40. From the sharp intake of breath as he begins reading aloud from his correspondence, it is clear that his feelings are still raw. Letters written shortly after their reunion begin with such endearments as "my special girl", "goddess", "darling miracle", "my princess". Declaring that she "walks on water", Lytton confesses how much he misses and thinks of her, miserable at the distance between Edinburgh and Durban. The places they have visited together are described as "sacred shrines".

But a persistent undercurrent of uncertainty and despair runs through almost every message, as he urges her to write more frequently and to reveal her own feelings. "I have found it easy to love you since we met, and am totally committed to our relationship. You illuminate my life... let this be our secret. But how important am I to you? Do you feel affection for me?" Breaking off, Lytton's voice cracks. Far worse than the pain, he says, are the shame and guilt. "You see how besotted I was? Every line oozing with obsession. I mean, what normal brother ever spoke to a sister in this way? How can a man approaching 70 experience emotions usually attributed to a screwed-up adolescent? It's sick."

He then produces a diary, one of several in his briefcase, labelled The Journal Of An Emotional Junkie, and offers to lend it to me. He started to keep the journal eight months ago, after discovering that his sister had begun a relationship with a 40-year-old South African banker. He became intensely jealous - an emotion, he stresses, that is virtually alien, and therefore deeply shameful, to him. In one revealing passage he fantasises about his sister having sex with her new lover. "On a visit, she'd shown me some sexy underwear she'd bought in London, including a thong. Once she left England, I visualised her gyrating around a pole, in a G-string, her boyfriend watching lustfully on the bed."

Although this is the first time Lytton has told any of this to a stranger, he feels that, by doing so, he is beginning to control and resolve the situation. "I'm letting you inside my head. Perhaps my experiences can help anyone else in a similar predicament, let them realise they are not alone, that they aren't going mad and haven't turned into some sick, perverted individual - all of which I thought until very recently."

In the past year, Lytton says, he came close to wrecking his marriage, having a complete nervous collapse, even committing suicide. What saved him was his sister's emotional detachment, his wife's extraordinary patience and understanding - and, most crucially, learning about a little-known phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction (GSA), increasingly acknowledged by post-adoption agencies to be a common feature of reunions between blood relatives who have never before met. "I seem to have contracted this condition, GSA, in its severest form," he declares, as if describing a virus. "Now that I know there is a condition, and why it occurs, I feel I have reached a turning point and will be able to work towards building a normal, balanced relationship with my sister." If, as seems possible, he comes through the crisis with his marriage, mental stability and relationship with his sister intact, Lytton will be in a fortunate minority.

The term GSA was first coined in the US in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, the founder of Truth Seekers In Adoption, a Chicago-based support group for adoptees and their new-found relatives. The emergence of GSA both in the US and the UK coincided with the relaxation of adoption laws in the mid-1970s, which gave adopted children easier access to their records and led to an increase in the number of reunions between adoptees and their blood relatives.

The unexpectedly high number of reported cases of men and women struggling with sudden and terrifying emotions after a reunion has surprised and perplexed most post-adoption agencies. So far, because of the taboos surrounding GSA and its variable and complex nature, the frequency of these cases is almost impossible to quantify, although some agencies estimate that elements of GSA occur in 50% of reunions. Growing awareness of its potentially devastating implications, especially in cases where relatives embark on a sexual relationship, has prompted some organisations to warn all clients attempting to trace a relative about the phenomenon, while also training counsellors to recognise the warning signs and to help adoptees and their families cope with the damage.

These may sound like important and timely advances but they don't, in fact, add up to much. Because of the revulsion aroused by incest, and the stigma attached to anyone who admits experiencing GSA - let alone those who embark on sexual relations with a parent or sibling - the condition remains obscured by myth, tainted by smutty innuendo, under-reported by sufferers and, worse, virtually ignored in academic circles. Although, occasionally, a story involving GSA is given predictably lurid tabloid coverage, ignorance prevails. Why GSA occurs only in some reunions, whether certain people are more predisposed to GSA than others, or whether it manifests itself differently between parents and children or siblings, is simply unknown. Above all, GSA raises serious questions about what factors influence sexual attraction: are the origins of GSA social, environmental or biological?

The lack of any serious scientific research is especially disturbing in view of the growing number of reunions between adoptees and their birth parents, and the prospect of many future reunions between children born through IVF involving sperm and egg donors. In the view of Sue Cowling, deputy director of the Post-Adoption Centre, "Genetic sexual attraction associated with IVF births is a time bomb waiting to go off." Cowling, like many professionals, suspects that the subject has remained a no-go area, even for psychologists, because even in a society wide awake to the spectre of paedophilia and sexual abuse in families, GSA - which falls into neither category - threatens to explode too many cosy assumptions about "normal" and aberrant sexual instincts.

Gonyo, the non-academic who originally "outed" GSA in the 1980s, has written the only book on the subject. In it, she suggests that romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of "missed bonding" that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. "Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not."

Gonyo's reputation as the world's leading GSA "expert" came about largely as a result of her own experience of strong sexual attraction, when, in 1979 and aged 42, she was reunited with her adult son 26 years after she had given him up for adoption. Now a 65-year-old grandmother, she admits, like Lytton (whom she has been counselling by email since he contacted her via the Truth Seekers website), that what saved her marriage and allowed her eventually to build a healthy relationship with her birth son Mitch was that she did not have sex with him, due to his unresponsiveness.

An energetic, cheery and straight-talking woman, Gonyo estimates that it took her a dozen years to overcome the desire to sleep with Mitch. "Believe me, the state of arousal, which grew as I got to know him, was as erotic as anything I felt for my husband. I wanted to get naked with Mitch, feel his flesh against mine. The first time I hugged him, it beat any feeling I've experienced in my life. If he had felt the same way, I don't know if I could have stopped myself. But Mitch was very afraid of my feelings, and wouldn't ever talk about any of this, or how he felt."

At that time, Mitch, an art teacher, had various girlfriends. "Despite this, my behaviour around him was atrocious. I was flirtatious, coquettish and playful. When getting ready to see him, I primped and primed, becoming like a 16-year-old in mind and body. I was trying to win him over, like someone I wanted to date or marry." Gonyo recalls feeling ashamed and dirty. "At the beginning, the urge was less erotic, more like bonding with a newborn child. As with all my subsequent children, I wanted to smell him, stroke and run my fingers through his hair. I saw so much of myself in him, and he also reminded me strongly of his father, my first teenage love." But having experienced that primary stage of "delayed bonding", Gonyo wanted more. "I was no longer looking for the baby, I wanted a relationship with the adult - the man." What frightened her was that these emotions did not fit into any appropriate context. "I wasn't Mitch's lover or girlfriend, and I couldn't be his mother, because he had one, although he never allowed me to meet her. I felt like an intruder, unimportant and humiliated."

When Mitch got married 12 years ago, Gonyo finally established a relaxed friendship with him. "It's as if I've turned him over to his wife, so now we can be friends. It took me until then to be able to say honestly that I don't have those sexual feelings any more. What meeting Mitch taught me was self-control." It also led to her passionate "mission" to encourage widespread understanding of GSA.

Twenty-five years ago, that would have seemed an absurdly unrealistic goal given that this realm of human desire was guaranteed to repel most people, including Gonyo's clients. Since then, not much has changed. "GSA becomes an incest issue, whether or not it is carried out in a sexual act," she says, pinpointing the most likely explanation for the paucity of research. "Most people will only reveal their own situation once someone else breaks the ice." Gonyon recalls that, when she told a support group for adoptees and birth mothers about her own feelings on meeting Mitch, her disclosure was met with repugnance. "Some openly dismissed such feelings as 'sick'." But, a few days later, she was phoned by the wife of one of the group's male participants, telling her that she was convinced her husband was similarly infatuated with his birth mother, whom he had recently met, and asking Gonyo if she could help him.

It wasn't until almost a decade later, when Gonyo became the director of Truth Seekers In Adoption and raised the issue of GSA, that others began plucking up the courage to confess their own "forbidden" attraction to a parent, adult child or sibling with whom they had been reunited. She vividly remembers the first time someone raised their hand in one workshop. A man in his 30s, he was the first person she saw stand up in a room full of people and speak the unspeakable. "He simply said, 'I slept with my mother. I was 21 when I found her. We were very much in love. After several years, it stopped.' His mother had ended the relationship because it was too painful for her; she felt guilty and was afraid of being discovered. That was more than 10 years ago, and he said he'd not only lost his lover but what was even more important: his mother. He said he had never regretted having sex with his mother, only that losing her was a high price to pay."

Many clients consult Gonyo privately, even anonymously, by phone or email. "Often, the attraction isn't sexual, but it's still frightening and alien, and therefore perceived as abnormal and sinful. One woman told me that she and her birth mother, soon after they met, slept together in the nude: there was no sex, only a strong need to be close as parent and child. Grown men tell me they've sat in their mother's lap, just being rocked and held. One man talked about his need to be sexual with his newly found brother, but not being homosexual they shared a woman instead."

Sometimes, she warns, there may be an underlying element of revenge: "One man admitted openly, 'My real mother fucked me over. Now I'm going to fuck her.'" In contrast, many others experience an almost primordial sense of having "belonged" to the other person all their life. For Gonyo, the recognition that she shared her son's sarcastic humour and artistic talents, and saw the "male side" of herself in him, were especially powerful. (This sudden "shock of familiarity" is often also commented on by twins separated at birth.)

Gonyo is not surprised that attraction between fathers and daughters should be the least reported variant of GSA. "That group tends to stay very silent. It's still regarded as dangerously close to abuse, even though it is no different from other forms of GSA." But it does happen: a woman who recently traced her non-identical twin daughters, and included the birth father at the reunion, was horrified when one of the daughters and the father became instantly attracted to one another. As is common in cases of parent-child GSA, the attraction involved the girl who most resembled her father. "It's like my meeting Mitch: for a woman, meeting your father is to meet the male aspects of yourself for the first time."

Sometimes, that recognition may act as a powerful aphrodisiac. A young woman in one of Gonyo's workshops confessed that she had been in love with her father, and he with her, since their reunion. Only after they both suffered mental breakdowns did they have sex. "Sadly, although they imagined it would be cathartic, after sleeping together they felt no happier."

Almost invariably, the outcome of sexual relations between reunited relatives is that any subsequent lasting relationship, platonic or otherwise, is doomed - a dilemma illustrated in Kathryn Harrison's 1997 memoir The Kiss, a frank, sometimes shocking, account of her affair with her father.

That awareness has led New York psychotherapist Joe Soll to adopt the term "genetic attraction", believing the word "sexual" is in many cases inaccurate and also responsible for the underlying shame and fear that make the condition so distressing. He has noticed that the "romance" that develops, especially when mothers meet their adult children, mirrors the sensuous bonding between a new mother and her baby. "These people regress to a very early stage of development. The relationship is sensual, but we don't call it 'romance' or being 'in love' when it's breastfeeding, cradling and stroking, or when it's a mother and baby gazing into one another's eyes. Often, people tell me all they want to do is snuggle up together. A woman reunited with her adult son felt an overwhelming urge to suckle. There's an urge for intimacy, which they were previously denied."

Where that urge leads to sex, which appears to be more common between brothers and sisters, Soll and Gonyo encounter the greatest desperation and refusal to exert self-control. "I'll get calls from clients asking me in which of the American states they would be allowed to set up home together, or even get married," says Gonyo. "It doesn't matter what age they are - when your hormones are raging, you don't think about the consequences."

GSA rarely features at conferences on adoption, however, because the big US institutions, such as the National Council For Adoption, are reluctant to recognise the phenomenon. On the rare occasions that workshops do take place, they are usually packed. Unlike the UK, most US states are opposed to "open" adoption, so adoptees' records are sealed, which presents a formidable obstacle to family research. Gonyo, meanwhile, is convinced that the more an adopted child is told about their original family, and sees photographs of parents and siblings indicating shared characteristics, the less likely this will come as an intense shock if they meet. "Although it is better to play in the sandbox as kids than in bed as adults," she says, "the authorities prefer to ignore GSA, so it remains confused with real incest, rape and child abuse."

But in the light of the confessions and desperate actions of some "victims" of GSA, isn't it understandable that such confusion exists? Understandable, perhaps, but not inevitable. In contrast to America's squeamishness in addressing the issue, by the early 1990s British post-adoption agencies such as Norcap, the Child Migrants Trust and the Post-Adoption Centre were already admitting that, far from being either unique or bizarre, or a sign of deviance or emotional disorder, GSA was an all too normal reaction to an extreme emotional situation - and more commonplace than supposed.

Not that this makes it any easier to understand. Today, the Post-Adoption Centre, which offers practical information and counselling at any stage before, during and after adoptee reunions, and sees 3,000 new clients a year, estimates that up to half of reunions are accompanied by anything from temporary attraction to obsessive sexual obsession - and, very occasionally, even to the birth of a child.

At their most extreme, such relationships can have dangerous and potentially tragic consequences for families, especially spouses. In a recent, well-publicised case, a mother of two, Jennifer Grant, and her adopted half-brother, John Shannon, a former mayor of Pickering, North Yorkshire, left their respective spouses and children and set up home together after being united for the first time in 46 years. Interviewed by a Sunday newspaper in 2001, Jennifer's husband Graham, whose physical resemblance to John is striking, talked about his ordeal, typical of casualties floundering in the riptide of such obsessions. "I asked her if she had gone to bed with him and she said they had. I just left the house, got in my van and drove. I wanted to do myself in. Then I thought of the boys and what it would do to them. When I got back, she had gone."

Graham Grant reportedly cannot come to terms with what has happened: "It fills me with shock and dread," he said. "Members of our family have found it hard to discuss the matter with me. There's a sense of shame and disgust. It's left me feeling like a leper." Although, reportedly, there was a police inquiry into his wife's relationship with Shannon, with which they co-operated fully, the investigation ended due to lack of evidence that any crime had been committed.

Under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, sexual intercourse between a brother or even a half-brother and sister is an offence that carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years. Although he escaped imprisonment, Scarborough police officer Tony Smedley's nine-month affair with his half-sister Janet Paveling tore apart his life. When Smedley's colleagues accidentally came across love letters that clearly referred to their sexual relationship, he and Paveling were arrested and committed for trial on charges of incest. He pleaded guilty when the case came to York crown court last month, and received a conditional discharge; the charges against Paveling were not pursued. Even so, Smedley lost his job, and must now try to rebuild a future with his wife and children, and with his sister's family. Another British brother and sister, Kim Straker and Terri O'Neill, who lived together as a couple and eventually had a child, were taken to court in the early 1990s. They were given suspended sentences and allowed to keep their daughter; they have since parted.

Even where such relationships do not end in turmoil and trauma, the effects of the taboo itself remain inescapably powerful. One of the strangest cases in recent years is that of Gary Klahr and Micka Zeman, who met in 1979 in their Connecticut hometown and enjoyed a casual six-month affair. In 1998, by which time both were in their 50s and married, Micka, knowing she was adopted, had traced her biological parents and found that she was one of 13 children born to the same couple, nine of whom were given up for adoption to couples in the area - one of them was Gary Klahr. On realising that she had had sex with her brother, Micka was physically sick. "Although it was brief and we were not that involved or serious, it was a shocking revelation and I was filled with tremendous guilt and sadness. I have since forgiven myself and realise it was foolish to feel guilty: after all, we did not know we were brother and sister, and when we re-met in 1998 the chemistry had long disappeared."

Although the news also shocked Gary, he maintains that someone less emotionally well-adjusted might have suffered greater damage. "A person with a different personality might have jumped out of the window, or at least had profound long-term feelings of guilt. But if you understand that nine out of 13 children from the biological family were adopted out to different families, with different names and different religions, within a 15-mile radius of the hospital where we were born, then something like this was bound to happen. I never had an idea, until 1998, that I was adopted: how could we have known that we were brother and sister?"

Cowling says that neither the threat of prosecution nor the suffering of families are a deterrent to those caught up in and determined to pursue such relationships. "I've heard women, including mothers sleeping with their sons, tell me, 'It's the most amazing sex I've ever had. Don't ask me to give it up - I can't.'"

When the relationship becomes obsessive and violent, especially between mothers and sons, the danger seems only to heighten the sexual chemistry and magnetic bond. "I've worked with cases where the violence has been terrifying because one person becomes fixated, phoning their relative 10, 12 times a day, demanding to know their movements, stalking them like a jealous lover," says Cowling. "But the other person still can't pull away. It's like an addiction." She cites a man who was imprisoned for violence against his mother: "The woman went into hiding, but he found her. We were getting panic-stricken calls from her at all hours, saying, 'He's coming for me, what shall I do?' Yet she, too, was obsessed with him. In another instance, a woman referred to her son as 'my lover' and talked of her body 'aching' for him. Unfortunately, for some men, the sex and violence is a way of punishing the birth mother for abandoning them, and for mothers the sex is a guilt trip: they feel they owe it to their son after giving him up for adoption."

The dilemma originally faced by professionals such as Cowling was that everyone wanted to help, but no one knew how. In 1992, Dr Maurice Greenberg, a consultant psychiatrist, head of student counselling services at University College London and former adviser to the Post-Adoption Centre, conducted what, incredibly, remains the only academic study into GSA. He interviewed eight male and female adoptees and analysed another 40 cases, including birth parents, reported by the Post-Adoption Centre; the objective was largely to gather information to help guide counsellors. Greenberg, who has the gentle, amiably absent-minded manner that instantly makes you want to tell him your troubles, admits he knew he was entering an unusual and special area and asked the Post-Adoption Centre why it did not simply acknowledge that these people were having incestuous relationships, rather than use the euphemism genetic sexual attraction. But was it really such a euphemism? What Greenberg couldn't foresee was how promptly he would do a u-turn, concluding that the consummation of GSA was "incest" only in the strictest biological sense. Today, he insists that it is essential to distinguish GSA from incest, and especially from child abuse. "There is no force, coercion, usually no betrayal of trust. And no victim. If sex occurs, it involves consenting adults."

He stresses that none of the interviewees who were sexually aroused by or had sex with a parent or sibling considered this incestuous, or that their behaviour was wrong, "But when I asked them if they might ever have similar feelings about members of their adoptive family, they shuddered at the suggestion".

Most interviewees described the period before a reunion as already exceptionally emotionally charged, filled with excitement and fantasies about meeting their relative. Reunions were characterised by so-called "mirroring" - the shock of familiarity and self-recognition on first meeting. Even where there is little physical resemblance, the emergence of shared interests, similar traits, mannerisms and instincts, often subtly transmitted through sense rather than verbal communication, tended to have a profound impact on one or both relatives. Greenberg says that many used the terms "finding a soulmate" and "like looking in the mirror for the first time".

Body odour, too, held an especially powerful attraction: there was, says Greenberg, frequent fascination with a relative's characteristic smell - acknowledged to be a potent factor in both human and animal attraction - as well as the feel of their skin and the sound of their voice. "The sudden, overwhelming sense of falling in love, a profound need for unusual closeness and intimacy, was almost universal. As adults, we have very limited abilities for communicating such intense feelings, and sometimes sex becomes the only familiar means."

The intriguing paradox that Greenberg appears to have uncovered is that, no matter how shocking it appears, GSA is a largely normal response to an extremely unusual situation: blood relatives meeting as strangers. More crucially, the existence of GSA, as distinct from habitual incest and child abuse within families, raises fundamental issues concerning sexual attraction, as well as with the origins of the "incest taboo" - areas that have only recently been the subject of serious research.

No analysis of incest and sexual desire is possible without the shadow of Freud looming over the debate. A new study by psychologists at the University of St Andrews shows that men and women are more likely to choose a spouse whose eye, skin and hair colour resembles that of their opposite-sex parent. Last year, a study by the same team revealed that women with older fathers, and men with older mothers, are usually attracted to older-looking partners. The same principle applies to racial characteristics, and to the smell of an opposite-sex parent. Although the reasons are unclear, one theory is that we are "imprinted" from birth with certain familiar characteristics with which we feel comfortable and to which we are eventually attracted.

However, Freud would have had an altogether different take on it, believing that the Oedipus complex was paramount in determining all sexual behaviour. Freud's theory, propounded in 1897, that every male infant has an overwhelming sexual desire for his mother, and every female for her father, is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. He maintained that these incestuous drives were so powerful that they had to be suppressed. Our transition, between the ages of two and five, from the incestuous Oedipal phase to the post-Oedipal phase, resolves these impulses and, according to Freudian theory, is crucial to healthy human development. By the time we reach the post-Oedipal stage, the incest taboo, Freud reasoned, is indelibly imprinted on the psyche, governing future sexual behaviour.

But how persuasive is this Oedipal theory nowadays? Because Freudian ideas dominated much of the 20th century, what is less well known is that, at the turn of the 19th century, a contemporary of Freud's, the Finnish social anthropologist Edward Westermarck, put forward the opposite view, based not on the theory of natural attraction but of natural aversion. According to Westermarck, children growing up in close proximity are not sexually attracted to each other as adults. Quite the contrary: the "Westermarck effect" meant that overfamiliarity and boredom automatically caused siblings and other close relatives raised together to go out of their way to avoid sexual contact. Westermarck also reasoned that, since we find the idea of sex with our relatives so distasteful, we developed moral codes and laws to ensure that society conformed to this "norm" to avoid any social disruption, shame or discrimination.

Although these ideas were rubbished by Freud for their lack of supportive evidence - despite his own inability to provide a scientific rationale for the Oedipus complex - in recent years evidence confirming the Westermarck effect among humans and other species continues to grow. By revealing more about what lies behind our choice of sexual partners, these findings may hold clues to the "mystery" of GSA.

In one ongoing study of children raised on Kiryat Yedidim, an Israeli kibbutz, between the 1950s and late 1960s, US and Israeli anthropologists were amazed to discover that the sabras - boys and girls of almost identical ages from different families - did not, as their parents hoped and anticipated, marry each other. As one of the first researchers, Melford Spiro, observed in 1958, the intimacy between these children, especially between the ages of seven and 12, could not have been greater. Not only did they shower, sleep and run around naked together and explore each other's bodies, as they approached puberty they began openly to play sex games, including intimate kissing, fondling and simulated, or attempted, sexual intercourse. Despite this climate of sexual freedom, by their mid-teens the girls, especially, displayed signs of shame and became hostile towards the boys, to the point of insisting on having unisex showers. At around 15, the girls became attracted to older students and young unmarried men in the kibbutz, admitting that they saw their peers as "brothers".

In a second phase of the study, when these children had grown up, it emerged that not only had no marriages taken place between any of the sabras from Kiryat Yedidim, and three other kibbutzim, but neither was there a single reported incident of sexual intercourse. Eventually, another team of sociologists analysed the records of almost all known kibbutz marriages, totalling nearly 3,000: in only 16 cases did members of the same peer group marry - and in these cases the couple had met only after the age of six.

In the 1960s, about the same time as the kibbutz studies were being concluded, Professor Arthur Wolf, an American anthropologist from Stanford University in California, travelled to Taiwan to study the effects of child-training methods on child behaviour. He ended up living for long periods in Chinese communities after discovering, by chance, that these had a high incidence of a certain type of arranged marriage - known as the sim-pua, or "minor form" - in which the bride was sent away as a young child by her parents to be brought up alongside her future husband as an adopted "daughter-in-law" of the family.

Wolf, now 70, has spent the past four decades examining the effects of this now almost extinct practice, and revealing its previously unforeseen consequences. "Although the age at which the girl went to the future husband's family was between three and five, in some areas of Taiwan they were under two. Many who entered these marriages were, in fact, nursed by their future mothers-in-law." When Wolf asked some of these surviving mothers-in-law why they did this, he was taken aback by their candour. "They explained that the children weren't treated as daughters: they were referred to as 'little daughter-in-law'. They'd say, 'It's better to raise your son's wife, because she will listen to what you tell her and won't always be talking about your son behind your back.' It was the classic mother-in-law strategy!"

A shortage of suitable brides in these developing communities in the late 19th and early 20th century made this "trade" in girl children an attractive proposition. Wolf discovered that the mothers of infant boys whose next child was a girl preferred to give her away and then adopt someone else's infant daughter as a future daughter-in-law. As in the kibbutzim, the future couple, very close in age, were effectively raised as siblings. Unlike the children from the kibbutz, however, they had to marry - and, as grown-ups, many refused to go through with the marriage, or did so only under threat of severe punishment. Some women, says Wolf, became prostitutes rather than marry their fiancée. And in marriage adultery was rife: "One man promised he would marry any other woman as long as it wasn't his fiancée, although she was very attractive. This was more than lack of sexual interest - it was a complete sexual indifference towards their intended partner, which, as Westermarck claimed, led to disgust and aversion when the act was merely thought of or became a possibility."

Wolf's studies of government records of marriages, divorces and births of everyone in Taiwan prove that, compared with other arranged marriages in which couples were introduced as adolescents, such "minor marriages" were a disaster. His analysis of 25,000 minor marriages found that many ended in divorce and few offspring. Most significant of all is Wolf's discovery that these marriages were spectacularly unsuccessful if the girl had been adopted into her husband's family when aged five or younger. "If she came at three or younger, the sexual aversion and rate of marriage breakdown was very high. After five or six, there wasn't much difference between married couples who met at 16. There is some factor in developmental psychology during the first three years of life that seems critical in determining sexual attraction, but we don't know yet what this factor is."

It may be a long time, if ever, before we can identify the complex interplay of nature and nurture behind the dramas of love and loathing played out in the kibbutz and in Taiwan. Or know precisely at what stage in the sweaty rough and tumble of shared childhood that the potential for mutual sexual desire is switched off. But one thing seems clear: GSA is neither a horror, an illness, nor a perversion. Indeed, given what we already know, might it eventually prove to be not that much of a mystery?

The World's No.1 Science & Technology News Service



Women marry men who look like dad


00:01 28 April 04

NewScientist.com news service

Women tend to choose husbands who look like their fathers - even if they are adopted, reveals a new study.

The research shows that women use their dads as a template for picking a mate by a process called "sexual imprinting", says Tamas Bereczkei at the University of Pécs in Hungary and colleagues.

Husbands and wives have long been suggested to look alike and this is known to occur in many animal species. Couples that look like each other are also more likely to share common genes, and having a degree of similarity is believed to beneficial.

This might explain the study's findings, suggests Glenn Weisfeld, one of the research team and a human ethologist at Wayne State University, Detroit, US "There seems to be an advantage for animals to select a mate somewhat similar to themselves genetically," he told New Scientist.

"One good possibility is that there are some fortuitous genetic combinations which are retained in the offspring if both parents are similar," he says. "In humans there is evidence to show a lower rate of miscarriage."
However, he points out that there is a balance between the benefits of marrying someone genetically close and the harmful effects of inbreeding. "There seems to be an ideal balance, maybe around the first or second cousin point."


Newborn ducklings


Imprinting is a fast, instinctive form of learning, perhaps best known from the phenomenon in which newborn ducklings bond with the first object they see.

To test whether women use imprinting to base their marital choices on the appearance of their fathers, the researchers took 26 adoptive families and examined how alike various family members looked. Using adoptive families meant inherited preferences could be ruled out.

Nearly 250 students were asked to rate similarities within three sets of photos. The first showed photos of the wife and four possible husbands, one of whom was the real spouse.

The second showed a photo of the adoptive father as he would have looked when his daughter was between two and eight years of age, and the possible husbands. The third set showed the adoptive mother and the four possible husbands.

The students correctly matched husbands and wives significantly more than they would have by chance alone. But the similarity between husbands and adoptive fathers was most striking. Where the judges might have matched a quarter of the husbands with the fathers by chance, they actually matched 38 per cent correctly.

There was no significant resemblance between the husband and the adoptive mother.


An "unexpected" finding, says Weisfeld, was that fathers who were judged by their daughters to have showed the most emotional warmth were much more likely to have son-in-laws who looked like them.

"Our results support the notion of a long-lasting effect of attachment during childhood on later mating preferences," the team concludes. They suggest that people form a "mental model" of their opposite-sex parent's appearance, which they then seek out in later life.

But Weisfeld points out that mating decisions are complex in humans and many other biological and social factors will play a part. For example, studies have shown that a person's smell can also help someone judge how related

Lactase Persistence in Africans and Back-Migration from Eurasia
The following study has two interesting conclusions: (i) that the phenomenon of lactase persistence in Africans has mostly a different genetic cause than in Eurasians, and (ii) there was a back-migration from Eurasia to Africa.

Am. J. Hum. Genet., 74:000, 2004

The T Allele of a Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism 13.9 kb Upstream of the Lactase Gene (LCT) (C-13.9kbT) Does Not Predict or Cause the Lactase-Persistence Phenotype in Africans

Charlotte A. Mulcare et al.


The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose as an adult (lactase persistence) is a variable genetic trait in human populations. The lactase-persistence phenotype is found at low frequencies in the majority of populations in sub-Saharan Africa that have been tested, but, in some populations, particularly pastoral groups, it is significantly more frequent. Recently, a CT polymorphism located 13.9 kb upstream of exon 1 of the lactase gene (LCT) was shown in a Finnish population to be closely associated with the lactase-persistence phenotype (Enattah et al. 2002). We typed this polymorphism in 1,671 individuals from 20 distinct cultural groups in seven African countries. It was possible to match seven of the groups tested with groups from the literature for whom phenotypic information is available. In five of these groups, the published frequencies of lactase persistence are 25%. We found the T allele to be so rare that it cannot explain the frequency of the lactase-persistence phenotype throughout Africa. By use of a statistical procedure to take phenotyping and sampling errors into account, the T-allele frequency was shown to be significantly different from that predicted in five of the African groups. Only the Fulbe and Hausa from Cameroon possessed the T allele at a level consistent with phenotypic observations (as well as an Irish sample used for comparison). We conclude that the C-13.9kbT polymorphism is not a predictor of lactase persistence in sub-Saharan Africans. We also present Y-chromosome data that are consistent with previously reported evidence for a back-migration event into Cameroon, and we comment on the implications for the introgression of the -13.9kb*T allele.

The Geek Syndrome


Autism - and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?

By Steve Silberman


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Nick is building a universe on his computer. He's already mapped out his first planet: an anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along with a three-gendered race known as kiman. As he tells me about his universe, Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over. "I'm thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven't decided yet, actually," he explains. The music of his speech is pitched high, alternately poetic and pedantic - as if the soul of an Oxford don has been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from Silicon Valley. Nick is 11 years old.

Nick's father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. They've known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. He's infatuated with fantasy novels, but he has a hard time reading people. Clearly bright and imaginative, he has no friends his own age. His inability to pick up on hidden agendas makes him easy prey to certain cruelties, as when some kids paid him a few dollars to wear a ridiculous outfit to school.

One therapist suggested that Nick was suffering from an anxiety disorder. Another said he had a speech impediment. Then his mother read a book called Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. In it, psychologist Tony Attwood describes children who lack basic social and motor skills, seem unable to decode body language and sense the feelings of others, avoid eye contact, and frequently launch into monologues about narrowly defined - and often highly technical - interests. Even when very young, these children become obsessed with order, arranging their toys in a regimented fashion on the floor and flying into tantrums when their routines are disturbed. As teenagers, they're prone to getting into trouble with teachers and other figures of authority, partly because the subtle cues that define societal hierarchies are invisible to them.

"I thought, 'That's Nick,'" his mother recalls.


Asperger's syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum - a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. In the taxonomy of autism, those with Asperger's syndrome have average - or even very high - IQs, while 70 percent of those with other autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation. One of the estimated 450,000 people in the US living with autism, Nick is more fortunate than most. He can read, write, and speak. He'll be able to live and work on his own. Once he gets out of junior high hell, it's not hard to imagine Nick creating a niche for himself in all his exuberant strangeness. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum are what diagnosticians call "profoundly affected" children. If not forcibly engaged, these children spend their waking hours in trancelike states, staring at lights, rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and flapping their hands, repetitively stimulating ("stimming") their miswired nervous systems.

In one of the uncanny synchronicities of science, autism was first recognized on two continents nearly simultaneously. In 1943, a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner published a monograph outlining a curious set of behaviors he noticed in 11 children at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A year later, a pediatrician in Vienna named Hans Asperger, who had never seen Kanner's work, published a paper describing four children who shared many of the same traits. Both Kanner and Asperger gave the condition the same name: autism - from the Greek word for self, autòs - because the children in their care seemed to withdraw into iron-walled universes of their own.

Kanner went on to launch the field of child psychiatry in the US, while Asperger's clinic was destroyed by a shower of Allied bombs. Over the next 40 years, Kanner became widely known as the author of the canonical textbook in his field, in which he classified autism as a subset of childhood schizophrenia. Asperger was virtually ignored outside of Europe and died in 1980. The term Asperger syndrome wasn't coined until a year later, by UK psychologist Lorna Wing, and Asperger's original paper wasn't even translated into English until 1991. Wing built upon Asperger's intuition that even certain gifted children might also be autistic. She described the disorder as a continuum that "ranges from the most profoundly physically and mentally retarded person ... to the most able, highly intelligent person with social impairment in its subtlest form as his only disability. It overlaps with learning disabilities and shades into eccentric normality."

Asperger's notion of a continuum that embraces both smart, geeky kids like Nick and those with so-called classic or profound autism has been accepted by the medical establishment only in the last decade. Like most distinctions in the world of childhood developmental disorders, the line between classic autism and Asperger's syndrome is hazy, shifting with the state of diagnostic opinion. Autism was added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, but Asperger's syndrome wasn't included as a separate disorder until the fourth edition in 1994. The taxonomy is further complicated by the fact that few if any people who have Asperger's syndrome will exhibit all of the behaviors listed in the DSM-IV. (The syn in syndrome derives from the same root as the syn in synchronicity - the word means that certain symptoms tend to cluster together, but all need not be present to make the diagnosis.) Though Asperger's syndrome is less disabling than "low-functioning" forms of autism, kids who have it suffer difficulties in the same areas as classically autistic children do: social interactions, motor skills, sensory processing, and a tendency toward repetitive behavior.
In the last 20 years, significant advances have been made in developing methods of behavioral training that help autistic children find ways to communicate. These techniques, however, require prodigious amounts of persistence, time, money, and love. Though more than half a century has passed since Kanner and Asperger first gave a name to autism, there is still no known cause, no miracle drug, and no cure.

And now, something dark and unsettling is happening in Silicon Valley.




In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California. In August 1993, there were 4,911 cases of so-called level-one autism logged in the state's Department of Developmental Services client-management system. This figure doesn't include kids with Asperger's syndrome, like Nick, but only those who have received a diagnosis of classic autism. In the mid-'90s, this caseload started spiraling up. In 1999, the number of clients was more than double what it had been six years earlier. Then the curve started spiking. By July 2001, there were 15,441 clients in the DDS database. Now there are more than seven new cases of level-one autism - 85 percent of them children - entering the system every day.

Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."

California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County. Here in Silicon Valley, family support services provided by the DDS are brokered by the San Andreas Regional Center, one of 21 such centers in the state. SARC dispenses desperately needed resources (such as in-home behavioral training, educational aides, and respite care) to families in four counties. While the autistic caseload is rising in all four, the percentage of cases of classic autism among the total client population in Santa Clara County is higher enough to be worrisome, says SARC's director, Santi Rogers.

"There's a significant difference, and no signs that it's abating," says Rogers. "We've been watching these numbers for years. We feared that something like this was coming. But this is a burst that has staggered us in our steps."

It's not easy to arrive at a clear picture of whether there actually is a startling rise in the incidence of autism in California, as opposed to just an increase in diagnoses. One problem, says Linda Lotspeich, director of the Stanford Pervasive Developmental Disorders Clinic, is that "the rules in the DSM-IV don't work." The diagnostic criteria are subjective, like "Marked impairment in the use of nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction."

"How much 'eye-to-eye gaze' do you have to have to be normal?" asks Lotspeich. "How do you define what 'marked' is? In shades of gray, when does black become white?"

Some children will receive a diagnosis of classic autism, and another diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome, from two different clinicians. Tony Attwood's advice to parents is strictly practical: "Use the diagnosis that provides the services."

While diagnostic fuzziness may be contributing to a pervasive sense that autism is on the rise, Ron Huff, the consulting psychologist for the DDS who uncovered the statistical trend, does not believe that all we're seeing now is an increase in children who would have previously been tagged with some other disability, such as mental retardation - or overlooked as perfectly healthy, if quirky, kids.

"While we certainly need to do more research," says Huff, "I don't think the change in diagnostic criteria will account for all of this rise by any means."

The department is making its data available to the MIND Institute at the University of California at Davis, to tease out what's behind the numbers. The results of that research will be published next year. But the effects of a surging influx are already rippling through the local schools. Carol Zepecki, director of student services and special education for the Palo Alto Unified School District, is disturbed by what she's seeing. "To be honest with you, as I look back on the special-ed students I've worked with for 20 years, it's clear to me that these kids would not have been placed in another category. The numbers are definitely higher." Elizabeth Rochin, a special-ed teacher at Cupertino High, says local educators are scrambling to create new resources. "We know it's happening, because they're coming through our schools. Our director saw the iceberg approaching and said, 'We've got to build something for them.'"

The people scrambling hardest are parents. In-home therapy alone can cost $60,000 or more a year, and requires so much dedication that parents (particularly mothers) are often forced to quit their jobs and make managing a team of specialists their new 80-hour-a-week career. Before their children become eligible for state funding, parents must obtain a diagnosis from a qualified clinician, which requires hours of testing and observation. Local facilities, such as the Stanford Pervasive Development Disorders Clinic and its counterpart at UC San Francisco, are swamped. The Stanford clinic is able to perform only two or three diagnoses a week. It currently has a two- to six-month waiting list.

For Rick Rollens, former secretary of the California Senate and cofounder of the MIND Institute, the notion that there is a frightening increase in autism worldwide is no longer in question. "Anyone who says this epidemic is due to better diagnostics," he says, "has his head in the sand."




Autism's insidious style of onset is particularly cruel to parents, because for the first two years of life, nothing seems to be wrong. Their child is engaged with the world, progressing normally, taking first steps into language. Then, suddenly, some unknown cascade of neurological events washes it all away.


One father of an autistic child, Jonathan Shestack, describes what happened to his son, Dov, as "watching our sweet, beautiful boy disappear in front of our eyes." At two, Dov's first words - Mom, Dad, flower, park - abruptly retreated into silence. Over the next six months, Dov ceased to recognize his own name and the faces of his parents. It took Dov a year of intensive behavioral therapy to learn how to point. At age 9, after the most effective interventions available (such as the step-by-step behavioral training methods developed by Ivar Lovaas at UCLA), Dov can speak 20 words.

Even children who make significant progress require levels of day-to-day attention from their families that can best be described as heroic. Marnin Kligfeld is the founder of a software mergers-and-acquisitions firm. His wife, Margo Estrin, a doctor of internal medicine, is the daughter of Gerald Estrin, who was a mentor to many of the original architects of the Internet (see "Meet the Bellbusters," Wired 9.11, page 164). When their daughter, Leah, was 3, a pediatrician at Oakland Children's Hospital looked at her on the examining table and declared, "There is very little difference between your daughter and an animal. We have no idea what she will be able to do in the future." After eight years of interventions - behavioral training, occupational therapy, speech therapy - Leah is a happy, upbeat 11-year-old who downloads her favorite songs by the hundreds. And she is still deeply autistic.

Leah's first visit to the dentist required weeks of preparation, because autistic people are made deeply anxious by any change in routine. "We took pictures of the dentist's office and the staff, and drove Leah past the office several times," Kligfeld recalls. "Our dentist scheduled us for the end of the day, when there were no other patients, and set goals with us. The goal of the first session was to have Leah sit in the chair. The second session was so Leah could rehearse the steps involved in treatment without actually doing them. The dentist gave all of his equipment special names for her. Throughout this process, we used a large mirror so Leah could see exactly what was being done, to ensure that there were no surprises."

Daily ordeals like this, common in the autistic community, underline the folly of the hypothesis that prevailed among psychologists 20 years ago, who were convinced that autism was caused by a lack of parental affection. The influential psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim aggressively promoted a theory that has come to be known as the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis. He declared in his best-selling book, The Empty Fortress, "The precipitating factor in infantile autism is the parent's wish that his child should not exist. ... To this the child responds with massive withdrawal." He prescribed "parentectomy" - removal of the child from the parents - and years of family therapy. His hypothesis added the burden of guilt to the grief of having an autistic child, and made autism a source of shame and secrecy, which hampered efforts to obtain clinical data. The hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited. Richard Pollak's The Creation of Dr. B exposed Bettelheim as a brilliant liar who concocted case histories and exaggerated both his experience with autistic children and the success of his treatments.

One thing nearly everyone in the field agrees on: genetic predisposition. Identical twins share the disorder 9 times out of 10.

But the debates about the causes of autism are certainly not over. Controversies rage about whether environmental factors - such as mercury and other chemicals in universally administered vaccines, industrial pollutants in air and water, and even certain foods - act as catalysts that trigger the disorder. Bernard Rimland, the first psychologist to oppose Bettelheim and promote the idea that autism was organic in origin, has become a leading advocate for intensified investigation in this area. The father of an autistic son, Rimland has been instrumental in marshaling medical expertise and family data to create better assessment protocols.

The one thing that almost all researchers in the field agree on is that genetic predisposition plays a crucial role in laying the neurological foundations of autism in most cases. Studies have shown that if one identical twin is autistic, there's a 90 percent chance that the other twin will also have the disorder. If parents have had one autistic child, the risk of their second child being autistic rises from 1 in 500 to 1 in 20. After two children with the disorder, the sobering odds are 1 in 3. (So many parents refrain from having more offspring after one autistic child, geneticists even have a term for it: stoppage.) The chances that the siblings of an autistic child will display one or more of the other developmental disorders with a known genetic basis - such as dyslexia or Tourette's syndrome - are also significantly higher than normal.

The bad news from Santa Clara County raises an inescapable question. Unless the genetic hypothesis is proven false, which is unlikely, regions with a higher than normal distribution of people on the autistic spectrum are something no researcher could ask for: living laboratories for the study of genetic expression. When the rain that fell on the Rain Man falls harder on certain communities than others, what becomes of the children?

The answer may be raining all over Silicon Valley. And one of the best hopes of finding a cure may be locked in the DNA sequences that produced the minds that have made this area the technological powerhouse of the world.




It's a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics - coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours - are residing somewhere in Asperger's domain. Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger's syndrome "the engineers' disorder." Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder. Dov's father told me that his friends in the Valley say many of their coworkers "could be diagnosed with ODD - they're odd." In Microserfs, novelist Douglas Coupland observes, "I think all tech people are slightly autistic."

Though no one has tried to convince the Valley's best and brightest to sign up for batteries of tests, the culture of the area has subtly evolved to meet the social needs of adults in high-functioning regions of the spectrum. In the geek warrens of engineering and R&D, social graces are beside the point. You can be as off-the-wall as you want to be, but if your code is bulletproof, no one's going to point out that you've been wearing the same shirt for two weeks. Autistic people have a hard time multitasking - particularly when one of the channels is face-to-face communication. Replacing the hubbub of the traditional office with a screen and an email address inserts a controllable interface between a programmer and the chaos of everyday life. Flattened workplace hierarchies are more comfortable for those who find it hard to read social cues. A WYSIWYG world, where respect and rewards are based strictly on merit, is an Asperger's dream.

Obviously, this kind of accommodation is not unique to the Valley. The halls of academe have long been a forgiving environment for absentminded professors. Temple Grandin - the inspiring and accomplished autistic woman profiled in Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars - calls NASA the largest sheltered workshop in the world.

A recurring theme in case histories of autism, going all the way back to Kanner's and Asperger's original monographs, is an attraction to highly organized systems and complex machines. There's even a perennial cast of hackers: early adopters with a subversive streak. In 1944, Asperger wrote of a boy "chemist [who] uses all his money for experiments which often horrify his family and even steals to fund them." Another boy proved a mathematical error in Isaac Newton's calculations while he was still a freshman in college. A third escaped neighborhood bullies by taking lessons from an old watchmaker. And a fourth, wrote Asperger, "came to be preoccupied with fantastic inventions, such as spaceships and the like." Here he added, "one observes how remote from reality autistic interests really are" - a comment he qualified years later, when spaceships were no longer remote or fantastic, by joking that the inventors of spaceships might themselves be autistic.

Clumsy and easily overwhelmed in the physical world, autistic minds soar in the virtual realms of mathematics, symbols, and code. Asperger compared the children in his clinic to calculating machines: "intelligent automata" - a metaphor employed by many autistic people themselves to describe their own rule-based, image-driven thought processes. In her autobiography, Thinking in Pictures, Grandin compares her mind to a VCR. When she hears the word dog, she mentally replays what she calls "videotapes" of various dogs that she's seen, to arrive at something close to the average person's abstract notion of the category that includes all dogs. This visual concreteness has been a boon to her work as a designer of more humane machinery for handling livestock. Grandin sees the machines in her head and sets them running, debugging as she goes. When the design in her mind does everything it's supposed to, she draws a blueprint of what she sees.

"In another age, these men would have been monks, developing new ink for printing presses. Suddenly, they're reproducing at a much higher rate."

These days, the autistic fascinations with technology, ordered systems, visual modes of thinking, and subversive creativity have plenty of outlets. There's even a cheeky Asperger's term for the rest of us - NTs, "neurotypicals." Many children on the spectrum become obsessed with VCRs, Pokémon, and computer games, working the joysticks until blisters appear on their fingers. (In the diagnostic lexicon, this kind of relentless behavior is called "perseveration.") Even when playing alongside someone their own age, however, autistic kids tend to play separately. Echoing Asperger, the director of the clinic in San Jose where I met Nick, Michelle Garcia Winner, suggests that "Pokémon must have been invented by a team of Japanese engineers with Asperger." Attwood writes that computers "are an ideal interest for a person with Asperger's syndrome ... they are logical, consistent, and not prone to moods."

This affinity for computers gives teachers and parents leverage they can use to build on the natural strengths of autistic children. Many teenagers who lack the motor skills to write by hand find it easier to use a keyboard. At Orion Academy, every student is required to buy an iBook fitted with an AirPort card. Class notes are written on electronic whiteboards that port the instructional materials to the school server for retrieval. (At lunch, the iBooks are shut off, and if the kids want to play a two-person game, they're directed to a chess board.) The next generation of assistive technology is being designed by Neil Scott's Archimedes Project at Stanford. Scott's team is currently developing the equivalent of a PDA for autistic kids, able to parse subtle movements of an eyebrow or fingertip into streams of text, voice, or images. The devices will incorporate video cameras, head and eye tracking, intelligent agents, and speech recognition to suit the needs of the individual child.

The Valley is a self-selecting community where passionately bright people migrate from all over the world to make smart machines work smarter. The nuts-and-bolts practicality of hard labor among the bits appeals to the predilections of the high-functioning autistic mind. The hidden cost of building enclaves like this, however, may be lurking in the findings of nearly every major genetic study of autism in the last 10 years. Over and over again, researchers have concluded that the DNA scripts for autism are probably passed down not only by relatives who are classically autistic, but by those who display only a few typically autistic behaviors. (Geneticists call those who don't fit into the diagnostic pigeonholes "broad autistic phenotypes.")

The chilling possibility is that what's happening now is the first proof that the genes responsible for bestowing certain special gifts on slightly autistic adults - the very abilities that have made them dreamers and architects of our technological future - are capable of bringing a plague down on the best minds of the next generation. For parents employed in prominent IT firms here, the news of increased diagnoses of autism in their ranks is a confirmation of rumors that have quietly circulated for months. Every day, more and more of their coworkers are running into one another in the waiting rooms of local clinics, taking the first uncertain steps on a journey with their children that lasts for the rest of their lives.

In previous eras, even those who recognized early that autism might have a genetic underpinning considered it a disorder that only moved diagonally down branches of a family tree. Direct inheritance was almost out of the question, because autistic people rarely had children. The profoundly affected spent their lives in institutions, and those with Asperger's syndrome tended to be loners. They were the strange uncle who droned on in a tuneless voice, tending his private logs of baseball statistics or military arcana; the cousin who never married, celibate by choice, fussy about the arrangement of her things, who spoke in a lexicon mined reading dictionaries cover to cover.

The old line "insanity is hereditary, you get it from your kids" has a twist in the autistic world. It has become commonplace for parents to diagnose themselves as having Asperger's syndrome, or to pinpoint other relatives living on the spectrum, only after their own children have been diagnosed.

High tech hot spots like the Valley, and Route 128 outside of Boston, are a curious oxymoron: They're fraternal associations of loners. In these places, if you're a geek living in the high-functioning regions of the spectrum, your chances of meeting someone who shares your perseverating obsession (think Linux or Star Trek) are greatly expanded. As more women enter the IT workplace, guys who might never have had a prayer of finding a kindred spirit suddenly discover that she's hacking Perl scripts in the next cubicle.

One provocative hypothesis that might account for the rise of spectrum disorders in technically adept communities like Silicon Valley, some geneticists speculate, is an increase in assortative mating. Superficially, assortative mating is the blond gentleman who prefers blondes; the hyperverbal intellectual who meets her soul mate in the therapist's waiting room. There are additional pressures and incentives for autistic people to find companionship - if they wish to do so - with someone who is also on the spectrum. Grandin writes, "Marriages work out best when two people with autism marry or when a person marries a handicapped or eccentric spouse.... They are attracted because their intellects work on a similar wavelength."


That's not to say that geeks, even autistic ones, are attracted only to other geeks. Compensatory unions of opposites also thrive along the continuum, and in the last 10 years, geekitude has become sexy and associated with financial success. The lone-wolf programmer may be the research director of a major company, managing the back end of an IT empire at a comfortable remove from the actual clients. Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have become monks, developing new ink for early printing presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher rate."

Genetic hypotheses like these don't rule out environmental factors playing a role in the rising numbers. Autism is almost certainly not caused by the action of a single gene, but by some orchestration of multiple genes that may make the developing child more susceptible to a trigger in the environment. One consequence of increased reproduction among people carrying some of these genes might be to boost "genetic loading" in successive generations - leaving them more vulnerable to threats posed by toxins in vaccines, candida, or any number of agents lurking in the industrialized world.

At clinics and schools in the Valley, the observation that most parents of autistic kids are engineers and programmers who themselves display autistic behavior is not news. And it may not be news to other communities either. Last January, Microsoft became the first major US corporation to offer its employees insurance benefits to cover the cost of behavioral training for their autistic children. One Bay Area mother told me that when she was planning a move to Minnesota with her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, she asked the school district there if they could meet her son's needs. "They told me that the northwest quadrant of Rochester, where the IBMers congregate, has a large number of Asperger kids," she recalls. "It was recommended I move to that part of town."




For Dov's parents, Jonathan Shestack and Portia Iversen, Silicon Valley is the only place on Earth with enough critical mass of supercomputing resources, bio-informatics expertise, genomics savvy, pharmaceutical muscle, and VC dollars to boost autism research to the next phase. For six years, the organization they founded, Cure Autism Now, has led a focused assault on the iron-walled fortress of the medical establishment, including the creation of its own bank of DNA samples, available to any scientist in the field on a Web site called the Autism Genetic Resources Exchange (see "The Citizen Scientists," Wired 9.09, page 144).

At least a third of CAN's funding comes from donors in the Valley. Now Shestack and Iversen want to deliver the ultimate return on that investment: better treatments, smarter assistive technology - and, eventually, a cure.

"We have the human data," says Shestack. "Now we need the brute-force processing power. We need high-density SNP mapping and microarray analysis so we can design pharmaceutical interventions. We need Big Pharma to wake up to the fact that while 450,000 people in America may not be as large a market as for cholesterol drugs, we're talking about a demand for new products that will be needed from age 2 to age 70. We need new technology that measures modes of perception, and tools for neural retraining. And we need a Web site where families with a newly diagnosed kid can plug into a network of therapists in their town who have been rated by buyers - just like eBay."

The ultimate hack for a team of Valley programmers may turn out to be cracking the genetic code that makes them so good at what they do. Taking on that challenge will require extensive use of technology invented by two people who think in pictures: Bill Dreyer, who invented the first protein sequencer, and Carver Mead, the father of very large scale integrated circuits. As Dreyer explains, "I think in three-dimensional Technicolor." Neither Mead nor Dreyer is autistic, but there is a word for the way they think - dyslexic. Like autism, dyslexia seems to move down genetic pathways. Dreyer has three daughters who think in Technicolor.
One of the things that Dan Geschwind, director of the neurogenetics lab at UCLA, finds fascinating about dyslexia and autism is what they suggest about human intelligence: that certain kinds of excellence might require not just various modes of thinking, but different kinds of brains.

"Autism gets to fundamental issues of how we view talents and disabilities," he says. "The flip side of dyslexia is enhanced abilities in math and architecture. There may be an aspect of this going on with autism and assortative mating in places like Silicon Valley. In the parents, who carry a few of the genes, they're a good thing. In the kids, who carry too many, it's very bad."

Issues like this were at the crux of arguments that Bryna Siegel had with Bruno Bettelheim in a Stanford graduate seminar in the early '80s, published in Bettelheim's The Art of the Obvious. (Siegel's name was changed to Dan Berenson.) The text makes poignant reading, as two paradigms of scientific humanism clash in the night. Siegel told "Dr. B" that she wanted to do a large study of children with various developmental disorders to search for a shared biochemical defect. Bettelheim shot back that if such a marker were to be uncovered it would dehumanize autistic children, by making them essentially different from ourselves.

Still an iconoclast, Siegel questions whether a "cure" for autism could ever be found. "The genetics of autism may turn out to be no simpler to unravel than the genetics of personality. I think what we'll end up with is something more like, 'Mrs. Smith, here are the results of your amnio. There's a 1 in 10 chance that you'll have an autistic child, or the next Bill Gates. Would you like to have an abortion?'"


For UCSF neurologist Kirk Wilhelmsen - who describes himself and his son as being "somewhere on that grand spectrum" - such statements cut to the heart of the most difficult issue that autism raises for society. It may be that autistic people are essentially different from "normal" people, he says, 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," says Wilhelmsen. "The healthiest state for a gene pool is maximum diversity of things that might be good."

One of the first people to intuit the significance of this was Asperger himself - weaving his continuum like a protective blanket over the young patients in his clinic as the Nazis shipped so-called mental defectives to the camps. "It seems that for success in science and art," he wrote, "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.

Hanging on the wall of Bryna Siegel's clinic in San Francisco is a painting of a Victorian house at night, by Jessy Park, an autistic woman whose mother, Clara Claiborne Park, wrote one of the first accounts of raising a child with autism, The Siege. Now 40, Jessy still lives at home. In her recent book, Exiting Nirvana, Clara writes of having come to a profound sense of peace with all the ways that Jessy is.

Jessy sent Siegel a letter with her painting, in flowing handwriting and words that are - there is no other way to say it - marvelously autistic. "The lunar eclipse with 92% cover is below Cassiopeia. In the upper right-hand corner is Aurora Borealis. There are three sets of six-color pastel rainbow on the shingles, seven-color bright rainbow on the clapboards next to the drain pipe, six-color paler pastel rainbow around the circular window, six-color darker pastel rainbow on the rosette ..."

But the words aren't the thing. Jessy's painting is the thing. Our world, but not our world. A house under the night sky shining in all the colors of the spectrum.