Jean, I agree with you totally, with one small addition. I do tend to think it may be environmental, some things that we now have too much of in our dirt, water, and air, but I also think it may be evolutional. We do change with the years, and normally no one generation notices the changes. We would have to have the ability to jump back or forward a few hundred years at a time to actually see it.
When we were young, there might be one in a large family of children who would be declared "simple." "Oh, don't mind Jack; he's simple." Unable to communicate well, but, if lucky enough to be in a farm family, one who had a special way with the sheep and the dogs and such like. Otherwise, possibly pretty much cast out and destined to die young.
If my granddaughter Jenny had not fought like a tigress to have her children diagnosed and given therapy, and folks, we are talking as many as THREE separate therapists PER DAY per child, week in and week out, they would both be totally lost in their own closed in worlds and her days would be filled with heart wrenching melt downs. As it is, the 10 year old only has two therapists and only two days a week, now. The 9 year old still needs much more help, but he is doing GREAT and will be high functioning eventually. Both are coping well in a regular public school environment. The ten year old is the math savant. He helps his fellow fifth graders, his teacher, and his (normal) Middle School brother. That's another thing concerning brain formation: "seeing" math and understanding how it works from the git go. Absolutely stuns me.
They say that somewhere in the early weeks when the zygote is dividing and multiplying, the developing embryo is given something like a car wash of hormones. This, they now believe, is when sexual mixups can occur. Nature is never perfect; it always makes a few errors in the copies it is making or in the amount and/or mix of hormones secreted. So we get male sex organs with female brains, and vice versa, plus many other variations occur. No doubt the formation of the brain follows a similar program. Now that we can actually, and this has only come about in MY lifetime, see viruses (which are not actually alive as such) with a highly specialized electronic microscope and see what they do in the matter of forcing themselves into cells and forcing those cells to do nothing further in our bodies EXCEPT make copies of the virus; in short, turn that cell into their own private Xerox machine, we (the scientists, not me!) are learning ever so much more about the making of our own selves from the fertilization of the egg on. Fascinating stuff.
