[sugarfactory]

Even though my intuition tells me that I should support neurodiversity my reasoning keeps failing to justify it without introducing "diversity is unconditionally good" as an axiom. I find it difficult to add it to the list of axioms I support because it seems like hypocrasy to endorse diversity considering the history of humans.

Almost every human has the ability to learn and speak language, which is unique to mankind. (What media often reports as an animal language is not a language in that it doesn't have recursion -- the ability to handle it is, Chomsky and his supporters believe, unique to humans)

But shortly after language was born, in the very first stage of evolution of language, there must have been significant percentage of people who could not learn language. Where did they go? The answer is: they went extinct, failing to reproduce. And that's why we all can learn and speak language. The ancestors of us are those who could speak it. By making it difficult to reproduce for those who couldn't speak language, through the process of natural selection, we managed to build society where almost all of the members can speak it. Having autism in this era is analogous to being non-verbal in the early stage of humans.

With that said, endorsing diversity seems to be denial of evolution to me, denial of how we have come this far. It is by putting selection pressure on those who cannot adapt to society. And the sad reality is, you cannot stop it from happening. Autistic people will go extinct, even without the gene-editing technology, just like non-verbal people went extinct.

[scalio]

Why do autistic people have to go extinct? Can't we support them in this wealthy day and age? Couldn't great cognitive tools lie beneath autism and other supposed illnesses? In my experience, "normal" people are the most boring because they can't think in (what they would consider) contorted ways.

There's a whole spectrum of people, one end which defines large parts of society, the plain average. On the other end are people whose minds are so distorted relative to the norm that it's impossible for them to function in our society. I would put the blame for that on society not being diverse or open enough.

It seems to me that evolution works because of diversity: an organism diversifies through mutations to the point where one type gets an advantage over the others and survives. Think of it this way: If you limit yourself to what you already know, you'll be turning in circles, constantly reaching the same conclusions for the same problems. Let some outside knowledge/factors mess things up and you'll be able to move on.

[drdeca]

Why would an is of evolution be considered to imply that ought?

The association of evolution with "unalloyed good" seems like a mistake to me, and this mistake seems potentially connected to Hegelianism.