How Autism is Made 12: The "Autistic Role" is Found Throughout the Kingdom of Life: Part IV of Autism and Superminds

On every rung of the ladder of purpose, we find examples of autistic individuals in the communities of living species.

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In this brief article, the fourth in this series exploring the relationship between autism and the human supermind, we’re going to pull back and look at all of Nature to see whether there are any other examples of autistic creatures on Earth.

As it happens, even though autism is only found in human brains (only fourth-rung minds can develop true autism because it requires an individual mind disconnected from a supermind), it turns out that an autistic role is a widespread and effective strategy for species survival across all four rungs of the ladder of purpose.  

We will see how the dark gift should be understood as a purposeful adaptation found within many communities of minds up and down the ladder of purpose. You are not an imperfect attempt at building a human. You are not broken. You are not wrong. You are something different. A new breed of conscious mind, a new breed of soul—though one with deep parallels to far more ancient minds across the empire of Life.

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In the previous article in this series, we briefly scrutinized the amoeba, a blobby little beastie. Its mind is a simple one, perched upon the first rung of the ladder of purpose. The amoeba is a single-celled creature who motors around dirt and rotten leaves hunting snacks. But when starvation strikes, the amoeba alters its behavior—and its mind.

Dramatically.

Motivated by famine, individual amoebas become gregariously tribal. They begin to seek out one another for a massive team-up. All the hungry little amoebas conjoin together, protoplasm to protoplasm, to form an amoeba supermind.

With their bodies tightly interlinked, they integrate their individual mental dynamics to form a new holistic “tribal mind” with a messianic goal: to build a tower to save the community. The top of the tower releases sticky spores that will (hopefully!) cling to a passing animal and get carried away to more fertile pastures.

Amoeba superminds are one of the tiniest and most ancient examples of tribal thinking: where individual minds sacrifice some measure of individual choice and purpose in order to support a higher purpose benefiting all minds in the community.

But there’s an interesting twist within the amoeba tribe. Almost all the amoebas in a territory experiencing famine end up joining the tribe and laboring shoulder-to-shoulder on a civil construction project (the spore tower). What’s interesting is the almost:

There are always a few amoebas who do not join the supermind.

These unconventionally unsocial amoebas continue to do their own thing according to their own sensibilities. Scientists refer to them as loners.

I think of them as autistic.

Scientists have studied loners and uncovered their crucial role in the survival and reproduction of species. Most of the time, when individual minds merge together to generate collective thought and behavior, the resulting community’s efforts are successful. Spores spread to new lands, for instance. But on occasion, the community’s efforts don’t pan out. Perhaps nobody ever ambles along for the spores to hitch a ride on. When the community stagnates or fails, loners become vital.

Sometimes a loner amoeba discovers a new source of nutrition and survives the famine and reproduces and continues the species. Thus, the loner serves as a sort of social safety net for the amoeba community, exploring alternative options unavailable to the tribe.

But amoebas are not the only species to produce “autistic” minds, not by a long shot. It turns out that the autism strategy is widespread up and down the ladder of purpose because it embodies a simple yet potent tactic: compel most minds to join the collective thought and action of the tribe, but preserve a few autistic loners who remain apart from tribal behavior and serve as a community insurance policy in case the tribe makes an awful decision or gets unlucky.

Locusts (who reside on the second rung of the ladder of purpose) are usually solitary insects, but if the population gets too crowded they collectively switch personalities to become intensely sociable and compliant, forming a synchronized locust supermind that swarms the Earth as one. However, some locusts—the loners—never make the transition to sociality and ignore the swarm to follow their own north star.

Wildebeests (who reside on the third rung) famously and cinematically team up for massive herding migrations across the grasslands of Africa encompassing more than a million beasts. Nevertheless, there’s always a small number of “autistic” wildebeests who don’t join the herd and continue marching to the beat of their own hooves.

Even the botanical kingdom, embodying biological purpose at its slowest, evinces autistic behavior. A community of bamboo usually flowers collectively, each plant in synchrony. But even here we find that a small portion of bamboo loners flower according to their own private timetable.

So, pilgrim, know this as flat fact: there is nothing particularly anomalous about our existence as different-thinking humans when one considers the full sweep of Life and Mind.

Autistic behavior is commonplace across all rungs of the ladder, including our human-monopolized fourth rung. In each case, no matter the complexity of the mind—the molecular mind of an amoeba, the neural mind of a locust, the module mind of a wildebeest, or the supermind of Homo sapiens—there arises a biological capacity to shut down the social circuitry in certain individuals in order to empower an individual mind to go rogue. To become a maverick.

To revel in the the blessings of the dark gift.

Nature offers us a role, an ancient and omnipresent role, a role that affords us opportunity to serve the greater good. A role making it our mission and duty to explore and experience the world in our own singular manner, and share what we discover.

Our gift to humankind is the gift of alternative perspective.

Previous Autism Lesson: 11: The Dark Gift Dilemma: Autism and the Supermind Part III

Next Autism Lesson: 13: Tribe is Truth, and Truth is Tribe: Part V of Autism and Superminds

Read FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS about Dr. Ogas and the Dark Gift