Silicon Valley's concentration of autism cases has triggered a spate of theories, from neighborhood contamination to a "geek gene." But a team of researchers from the University of California-Davis has found one factor that unites this and nine other California clusters of cases of the developmental disability: parental education. College-educated parents of autistic children are more likely to fight for a diagnosis — and seek the state-funded services that accompany it — than less-educated parents, according to the team.See the MIND Institute release here.
Belief in a link between parental intelligence and autism goes back to Leo Kanner, who first described autism in 1943. As Laura Schreibman explains in The Science and Fiction of Autism (Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 82):
[T]here may have been a sampling error in Kanner's first group of parents. It is certainly more likely that an intelligent, well-educated parent would have been aware of Leo Kanner, the leading child psychiatrist of his day, and that a parent who could afford to take his child to Johns Hopkins University to be seen by Dr. Kanner must have had above-average financial resources.
