due to the difficulties with social interactions autistics do by average build the relationships that accomodate parenthood at a later age than other people.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

So you're saying that when looking for a correlation between age of the father and prevalence of autism of the child, you need to account for the confounding factor of heritability since among a population of fathers who are older, there will be a higher prevalence of autism than in a population of fathers of an even distribution of ages (the general population) due to the social factor.

Sounds like a reasonable and logical take. Are you aware of any studies that show this or is it your own hypothesis?

[–] foenkyfjutschah@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

well for a quantitive study you'd need to track data about age and diagnosis of diagnosed and undiagnosed autistic as well as other fathers in quiet a large amount, assuming that about 3% of the population is autistic. i'd be very sceptical about the accuracy of such data. you could probably well show the causality in qualitative studies. but then the results are rather anecdotical and certainly somehow biased to draw conclusions about Homo sapiens s. at large.

given that i live at a place where two generations back people were mass-murdered based on their descendence, also related to psychiatric diagnosis, and that i'm trying to oppose Instrumentelle Vernunft, i'm quiet happy that i assess there's hardly a proof for that thesis.