The interconnections between genes has led to proposals of “omnigenic” models, the idea that all genes expressed in a cell affect every given trait of the cell, to some extent.

When it comes to something like autism, it’s a word covering a vast number of traits and behaviors of many different cells that gives rise to that set of effects as seen from outside.

And the issue with genetic testing is, we often only look at specific regions of the genome. Even when we do whole genome tests, and compare whole genomes of autistic folks, what we find is no single origin but many overlapping patterns. No definitive set is found because we are looking at complex processes that have many nodes where mutations can mildly tweak the function. Many such functionally relevant mutations can chain together to give you the signatures of autism, and no two are the same.

All these reasons also point to why we are increasingly realizing autism isn’t a “disease” with a “cure”. It’s a way in which people can be people. It’s time society accepted that and expands itself to accommodate.

Segfaults are precise symptoms - they occur only when there's a memory issue. Autism isn't precise, is a collection of characteristics that manifest differently in each person.

Genetic is, for the purpose of this conversation, a precise diagnosis - means you carry parent genes that will cause the issue. Memory management isn't: what caused it? Code error? OS error? Processor? Is it a bad code path or a unexpected exrtenal state?

Finally, an analogy of your analogy: you measure someone temperature and it's 40C. You diagnose a fever.

Segfaults are fever, just a symptom.

Memory defaults can also cause segfaults.

Most countries track growth curves, and ask parents about what their height is to correlate data with. One can also use bone age assessment.

This rings true to me. As someone with an autistic loved one, I obviously think about it a lot.

If it were as simple as there being some simple genetic basis that gives you a single thing called autism, I would expect it, honestly, to have naturally died out long ago, just because it makes so many things harder for people that it cannot possibly have not had a disadvantage to reproduction.

I predict it would be possible to quantify the effects objectively, as a thought experiment: assuming functional proteins, gene regulation is about binding affinities of cellullar chemical species to promoter regions, so 200k promoter regions x number of chemical species present in humans give us the number of binding affinities that describe the behavior of human cells (essentially all cell types excluding some germ-line cells, but including brain cells).

the thought experiment: apart from ethics nothing prevents humanity from going to all the remaining wild-type or near wild-type humans (when did 5% of the local population start wearing glasses? as a measure of wild-type-ness), and collecting as many individual genomes as possible, for a reference data set for the table of binding affinities. For each individual genome there is 1 table of binding affinities. Now we start averaging the value of each location in the table by averaging this table over all the collected genomes.

So theoretically we could collect the bulk of the gene regulatory information / skills encoded in the genome for wild-type humans. Next we can traverse the medical literature on autism and collect all the reported or suggested features, survey answers, diagnostic indicators for the full autism spectrum, and for each population in such a separating indicator, fetch example genomes from the purported indicated and unindicated groups, and compare their averaged binding affinity tables until you resolve or exclude any genetic correlation.

Or people downvote because I can't wait for science to ... progress?

Male homosexuality is believed to have a small genetic component but is also linked to birth order. One theory is that in utero testosterone from older brothers can affect the sexuality of a younger brother.

I disagree that it makes no sense for environmental factors to lead to the onset of autism, on the basis that environmental factors can make someone gay or schizophrenic. That is to say, they can influence a personality and a mind in complicated ways that don't seem intuitive.

What happened here is simple: the autistic kids got better at masking in order to placate the researchers who were shoving poop up their butts. In the hope of making it stop.

I don't see AI as a solution here as it's all rather murky and proprietary.

EDIT: To add, if you get it slightly wrong... you're fine, it'll be adjusted for in next year's taxes.

[0] ...because it has to, in order to investigate evasion.