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Neuronal Excitability & Schizophrenia
In comparison to autism, schizophrenia has had a longer history of study. Yet in recent times, research into the condition seems to have received less money than autism itself, most likely due to the...
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First Trimester Ischemia as a Risk for Autism?
In the 1950s, the company, Chemie Gruenenthal, marketed a drug intended for the treatment of respiratory infections. Soon, however, they realized it worked as an effective sedative and, more...
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Nonrandom Mating and its Relationship with Autism, ADHD, and Schizophrenia
When choosing romantic partners, we’re all familiar with the phrase “like attracts like”. Ironically, however, this phenomenon is all too often overlooked in modern genetics studies. In a recent study...
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Our latest publication: High-risk genes for autism function in the nucleus...
Over the last year and a half, I’ve been studying rare forms of intellectual disability (ID) that have single-gene (monogenic) origins using various bioinformatics approaches. My primary interest was...
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Our Obsession with the Synapse in Autism – Is It Really that Simple?
Ever since synaptic gene mutations were discovered in autism, the scientific world has been obsessed [1, 2]. Interestingly, however, these synapse-specific genes make up only a small minority of autism...
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Links between the Metabolic Syndrome, the Immune System, and Autism
Last weekend I attended a Think Tank sponsored by the Autism Research Institute. In attendance were Judy van de Water and Paul Ashwood from the MIND Institute, reporting on some of their latest...
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Change Is Coming – Lessons from Geology on Extinction Events
I’ve been reading the second edition of Michael Benton’s, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, which tells of what we know of the Permian extinction prior to the rise of the...
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The Absurdity of “Just So Stories” in Explaining Evolution
And the Camel said ‘Humph!’ again; but no sooner had he said it than he saw his back, that he was so proud of, puffing up and puffing up into a great big lolloping humph. ‘Do you see that?’ said the...
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Tweny-three Chromosome Pairs? Try 1,000!
Every once in awhile, maybe once in a blue moon, you may read something that’s so left-field, so alien that it literally changes your fundamental concepts. For me that happened last weekend as I read a...
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Gene Evolution Is All about Regulation
Okay, so gene evolution isn’t entirely about regulation. But protein-coding sequences of genes have changed comparatively little over hundreds of millions of years. When you look at the proteins that a...
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Animal, Plant, & Fungal Genomes Have Streamlined Over Time
Let’s face it: humans are kinda narcissistic. For those of us who are evolutionarily-minded, as such we have a tendency to envision ourselves as lying at the pinnacle of eukaryotic development– in...
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Is a Lack of Consanguinity Uncovering the Hidden Autism in Our Genes?
Although it’s a difficult topic to study, because the human species has experienced a number of population bottlenecks over time it’s assumed that rates of consanguinous (close kinship) marriage or...
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Kanner’s Eleven Families
The term, Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP), is not a diagnosis. Instead, it’s used to refer to sub-diagnostic traits of autism in family members of those with the condition. Symptoms can include: Minor...
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What Are the Major Differences between Autism & Intellectual Disability?
The notion of overlap between autism and genius has been culturally popularized. However, a significant portion of those on the spectrum also test within the intellectually disabled (ID) range with an...
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The Walking Whales
Whales have a pretty phenomenal evolutionary story. Not only do they share our terrestrial mammalian history, arising from a hooved deer-like creature, but they subsequently managed to become fully...
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What’s Unique about Human Brain Evolution?
Even though we’ve been separated by about 450 million years of evolution, humans and zebrafish share homology in roughly 70% of their genes. Yet in spite of this commonality, few would deny that humans...
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The Face of Donald J. Trump
This blog post isn’t a diagnosis. I’m not a clinician, although as a researcher I do study the molecular basis of congenital malformations. And this isn’t meant to be a statement on politics or...
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Autism, Genetic Risk Factors, & Ultrasound
It’s been a few months since the paper by Webb et al. (2016) came out, reporting a possible link between first trimester ultrasound exposure and increased autism severity in those individuals with...
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Sex Differences in Autism May Be Linked to Secondary Sex Traits
Why is autism diagnosed more often in boys than girls? True, there is some evidence to suggest that the diagnostic criteria themselves were based primarily on males and therefore better reflect autism...
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Infantile Tauopathies: Changing How We Think of Neurodegeneration
When we think of the term, “neurodegeneration,” the classic pictures of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s Diseases typically come to mind. We may envision an older person who exhibits memory loss, maybe...
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