NeuroTribes Book Review

I’ve recently been looking into autism a bit, partly because it seems relevant to the whole Annunaki / Yahweh / Origin of Consciousness story. It’s a new thread for me, and I started with a book called NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, authored by Steve Silberman, because I could rent it in audio format from my library with little wait time. There are other books that I am more looking forward to read, where the library wait time is still measured in months, so we’ll get to those later.

The NeuroTribes book is a thorough and engaging account of the history of our cultural and medical understanding of autism. If you are looking into autism, and as part of your research, you want to take a look at the history of it, this is a good resource. It's definitely worth the read, even though I only gave it three stars on Goodreads. I have some criticisms, which I will list here, that may or may not be relevant to you:

1) While this is a thorough account, there is no sense whatever of a dramatic arc, or anything like that. The story simply ends at the point in time when the author wrote the book.

2) There's a lot of characters in the book and it can be hard to keep them all straight.

3) The author subscribes to the preposterous, conformist, orthodox view that autism is caused mostly by genetics, that environmental factors are not significant, and that toxins in vaccines have nothing to do with it. On the plus side: The author does not fixate on this issue at all, and people who disagree should not be thrown off track in finding value in this book. I suppose it would be very difficult to write and publish a book such as this without maintaining these orthodox views. Still, it is shameful.

For example, in the final chapter, after discussing some people blaming autism on environmental toxins, the author states, "Our DNA tells a different story. In recent years, researchers have determined that most cases of autism are not rooted in rare de novo mutations, but in very old genes that are shared widely in the general population." The implication here is that damage from environmental factors must express itself as genetic damage. How idiotic is that? Are we supposed to believe that we are made entirely of genes? What ever "science" promulgates such ways of thinking most certainly does more harm than good, and is far afield from any search for truth.

4) When the author discusses special talents and abilities that autistic people sometimes have, he invariably focuses on STEM skills. It is certainly true common for autistic people to have special skills in STEM. But autistic people also commonly have special abilities in other areas as well, including psi and spirituality, and this book completely ignores that. This focus on STEM is typical of the materialist worldview that still claims to be dominant in today’s world.

5) The author tells an interesting story about the pulp fiction era of the 1920's, focusing on a couple of instrumental characters that were probably on the spectrum. Author spends a signification amount of time talking about pulp fiction, but makes this era out to be entirely about science fiction. Connoisseurs of pulp fiction are well aware that the contributions of pulp to the horror genre were at least as important as the contributions to science fiction. And pulp adventure stories were probably even more popular than pulp science fiction at the time. This example reinforces my point 4) above, but is a significant point of criticism in its own right. You can't talk pulp for pages without at least mentioning Lovecraft.