How probably is autism an evolutionary adaptation to computerized environment requiring less of certain skills but, more of others?
Very high is the probability that autism is an evolutionary adaptation to a computerized environment requiring different skills. Especially because, at least in children, autism correlates with testosterone. Plus, certain autistics outperform the general population with computers. Lastly, autism correlates with lacking skills less computerised, such as tennis and socialization.
Work Cited
Moller , Ralph. “Autism and Testosterone: Everything You Should Know.” Above & Beyond ABA Therapy, 18 Sept. 2023, www.abtaba.com/blog/autism-and-testosterone. "There is evidence to suggest that there may be a link between autism and testosterone. Research has shown that children with autism tend to have higher levels of testosterone in their bodies than children without autism."
Autism cannot be an evolutionary adaption simply because evolutionary adaption in humans happens over time on the order of hundreds to thousands of generations. This would take thousands, tens of thousands of years at minimum, if not many times more, for us homo sapiens sapiens.
Hope that answers your question. Whether or not the phenomenon you propose will occur, our descendants will have to observe.
In addition, it is doubtful that autism portends an increased likelihood for mate attraction and higher breeding rates. If anything, it is the opposite. The mechanism of natural selection in general favors survival due to the inheritance of a certain trait, autism as a psychiatric diagnosis, is mostly a scholalry diagnosis not yet attributed to a singular biological cause. It would thus be hard to trace the roots of autism prior to the inception of language.
It is pretty much certain that it is not such an adaptation insofar as the behavioral profile of children with autism was first scientifically identified as a specific syndrome with a set of deficits (and sometimes splinter skills) by Leo Kanner (1943) and Hans Asperger (1944) based on children they were treating in their respective clinics-- Kanner at Johns Hopkins and Asperger Austria. In fact Asperger began speaking and writing of autism in 1937, but his work was in German, and the war pretty much kept his early work hidden for many years. The behavioral profile characteristic of the autism spectrum disorder (a term and view of autism as a spectrum rather than a highly standardized set of characteristics) is due to the work of Lorna Wing in the early 1980s. The syndrome may go back to antiquity, but at minimum was considered a feature of childhood schizophrenia by Paul Eugen Bleuler in 1908.
For Screen Autism, maybe this may align, but generally one has to carefully consider the pros and cons of technology in autistic children.
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