It's no surprise - some letters about David Wolman's autism article in New Scientist magazine

I've noticed that the recent interesting article about the supposed pros and cons of autism that was published in New Scientist on the first of May 2010 has inspired some letter-writing, which isn't surprising as autism is always a topic that draws interesting and strong opinions, and one of those letter writers is Michelle Dawson, which again, isn't surprising. Ms Dawson took issue with the bit in Wolman's article in which Wolman made the claim that three-quarters of autists have an IQ in the intellectually disabled range, which once again, isn't surprising. My bullshit detector went off when I read that bit too, but the truth be told, I was so pleased to see at least an airing of some examination of the positive side of the spectrum in a magazine article that I didn't follow it up. One would assume that in this day and age an article about "autism" in New Scientist should include the whole autistic spectrum, including AS, under the term "autism". By most defintions, people with AS are supposed to have a normal level of intelligence, and we make up a good proportion of the spectrum. I find it hard to believe that there is any study that has found that the population of the spectrum as a whole has a distribution of intelligence like that described by Wolman.

My guess is that Wolman took the questionable figure from the 2007 Sharon Begley Newsweek article about the Raven's IQ test and children who "had full-blown autism, not Asperger's", and messed up the facts a bit like journalists do, and dropped it into the May 2010 New Scientist article about autism in a way that made it look like it might have been a research finding from the Dawson/Mottron team. If I were Dawson or Mottron I'd take issue with this too. The online version of Begeley's article gives no source for her figure of three-quarters of autistics being subnormal in IQ. I wouldn't be surprised if Begley got that figure from some dumbed-down unreferenced fact-sheet about autism put out by some autism association or charity. God only knows where the figure might have originated before that point.

Letters
New Scientist
May 26th 2010
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627620.100-autism-accuracy.html