Human Brain Evolution May Help Explain Autism Prevalence
Rapid evolution in certain human brain cells may have helped boost language and thinking while also increasing the biological pathways linked to autism.
Details
A 2025 study in Molecular Biology and Evolution explores why autism-related traits are relatively common in humans by looking at how the human brain evolved. The researchers focused on a type of neuron in the outer layer of the brain that appears to have changed especially quickly during human evolution. They also found evidence that genes linked with autism underwent evolutionary changes in humans. The proposed idea is that some of the same biological changes that helped shape uniquely human abilities may also have made early brain development more sensitive to disruption. The study discusses a possible connection between slower brain development after birth, language-related abilities, and the high prevalence of autism in humans. Importantly, the research does not show that autistic people are inherently more intelligent, nor does it establish that autism is simply a cost of intelligence. It proposes an evolutionary explanation for why changes that helped produce distinctive human cognition could also be associated with greater neurodevelopmental variation. The authors describe this as a hypothesis about human evolution rather than a simple cause-and-effect explanation for every case of autism.
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