We raise the new possibility that people diagnosed with developmental dyslexia (DD) are specialized in explorative cognitive search, and rather than having a neurocognitive disorder, play an essential role in human adaptation. Most DD research has studied educational difficulties, with theories framing differences in neurocognitive processes as deficits. However, people with DD are also often proposed to have certain strengths – particularly in realms like discovery, invention, and creativity – that deficit-centered theories cannot explain. We investigate whether these strengths reflect (...) an underlying explorative specialization. We re-examine experimental studies in psychology and neuroscience using the framework ofcognitive search, whereby many psychological processes involve a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. We report evidence of an explorative bias in DD-associated cognitive strategies. High DD prevalence and an attendant explorative bias across multiple areas of cognition suggest the existence of explorative specialization. An evolutionary perspective explains the combination of findings and challenges the view that individuals with DD have a disorder. In cooperating groups, individual specialization is favored when features that confer fitness benefits are functionally incompatible. Evidence for search specialization suggests that, as with some other social organisms, humans mediate the exploration–exploitation trade-off by specializing in complementary strategies. The existence of a system of collective cognitive search that emerges through collaboration would help to explain our species’ exceptional adaptiveness. It also aligns with evidence for substantial variability during our evolutionary history and the notion that humans are adapted not to a particular habitat but to variability itself. Specialization creates interdependence and necessitates balancing complementary strategies. Reframing DD therefore underscores the urgency of changing certain cultural practices to ensure we do not inhibit adaptation. Key improvements would remove cultural barriers to exploration and nurture explorative learning in education, academia, and the workplace, as well as emphasize collaboration over competition. Specialization in complementary search abilities represents a meta-adaptation; through collaboration, this likely enables human groups (as a species and as cultural systems) to successfully adapt. Cultural change to support this system of collaborative search may therefore be essential in confronting the challenges humanity now faces. (shrink)

Advocates of cognitive enhancement maintain that technological advances would augment autonomy indirectly by expanding the range of options available to individuals, while, in a recent article in this journal, Schaefer, Kahane, and Savulescu propose that cognitive enhancement would improve it more directly. Here, autonomy, construed in broad procedural terms, is at the fore. In contrast, when lauding the goodness of enhancement expressly, supporters’ line of argument is utilitarian, of an ideal variety. An inherent conflict results, for, within their utilitarian frame, (...) the content of rational, hence autonomous, choices is quite restricted. Further, advocates do not clearly indicate their relative emphasis between the often conflicting goals of maximizing benefit and avoiding harm. In practice, their construction of harms is highly expansive, for disabilities include any constraints that “rational” people would decline if it were technically possible to do so. For advocates, this means that where enhancement measures are available, those constraints become avoidable limitations, and not to remove them is to harm. The centrality of harm-avoidance and their ideal utilitarian frame entail sociopolitical requirements that enhancement defenders disallow when trumpeting autonomy in the vein of individual choice. Advocates have thus not done enough to support the claim that their views are wholly separate from earlier eugenics. (shrink)

A preimplantation genetic test to discriminate between severe and mild autism spectrum disorder might be developed in the foreseeable future. Recently, the philosophers Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane claimed that there are strong reasons for prospective parents to make use of such a test to prevent the birth of children who are disposed to autism or Asperger’s disorder. In this paper we will criticize this claim. We will discuss the morality of selection for mild autism in embryo selection in a (...) hypothetical in vitro fertilization (IVF) situation where preimplantation genetic diagnosis is performed and compare this with a similar selection for congenital deafness. To do this we first discuss relevant human differences. We then introduce the principle of human capabilities (PC) and compare this principle with the principle of procreative beneficence (PB) introduced by Savulescu and Kahane. We apply the two principles to selection for mild autism and selection for congenital deafness. We argue that PC allows for the selection for mild autism but rules out selection for congenital deafness. PB will not give clear answers; the ruling of PB depends to a large extent on expected social, cultural and political developments. We will argue that PC is preferable to PB. We will discuss arguments for the value of mild autism for individuals who have this condition and argue that they are able to lead a life with human dignity provided autism-friendly social circumstances are present. Neither PC nor PB yields strong reasons for prospective parents to seek to prevent the birth of children who are disposed to mild autism spectrum disorder. (shrink)

In the target article, Crespi & Badcock (C&B) propose a novel hypothesis based on observations that a large set of phenotypic traits exhibit diametrically opposite phenotypes in autism-spectrum versus psychotic-spectrum conditions. They propose that development of these conditions is mediated in part by alterations in This hypothesis is based on the model of the Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes. The authors have produced a masterful discussion of the differences between psychosis and autism. Of course, another article could be written on the (...) similarities. (shrink)