Interesting speculations on autuism

Seed magazine has an interesting article on autuism by Simon Baron-Cohen , professor of developmental psychopathology and director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. Apparently, autuism is on the increase from about four in 10,000 in the 70's to one percent today. It is not clear from the article in which countries this increase has taken place but media reports indicate high incidence in places like the Silicon Valley. Cohen's guess is that systemitizing mechanism is set at higher level in the case of autuistic children and that there is assortative mating at work: people who are attracted to systems are more likely to have a partner who shares this characteristic. And modern life is throwing such people together. Cohen gives some testable predictions. My friend Perepa Joshi's son is researching on autuism and I hope to get some feed back one of these days.