You’re touching on something about epigenetics and traume that could be very insightful Dana G Smith
Harry Harlow conducted experiments on infant apes and monkeys, traumatizing them by removing them from their mothers and putting them in cages with bottle feeders and chicken wire facsimiles of mother monkeys. He thought he was testing to see whether the bond between infant and mother was based solely on operant condition (she is a source of milk, so I am attached to her), or something else was going on.
Well, he discovered that something else was going on.
When he returned these tortured primates back to their troops, they were ostracized, and beaten. Untutored as they were in the complex primate social hierarchies, Harlow described them as “autistic”.
What that means is that autism can be trained into young primates at an early age.
What Harlow never investigated was whether those autistic traits could be passed on to future generations via epigenetic mechanisms.
Your article suggests that they could. And if that is the case, it might revolutionize our understanding of the origins of and therapies for autism.
Evan Carter will be interested.
