Just wondering if someone had some research on this highly speculative and completely unfalsifiable theory:

• Autism used to be more common, but as human society grew larger and more interdependent, conforming to the emotional needs of others grew increasingly important to survival; in this environment, the truth-speaking traits of autism were actively selected against.

I don't think I've read a single thing about this theory, but I'm making a connection between dogs--evolved to be emotionally dependent on humans and a little dumb--and the people I see being promoted at work, and expanding that dynamic out over a few hundreds of thousand of years.

There's a form of evolution--neoteny--where species basically halt their maturation in earlier and earlier stages. There are physical traits that go along with this, but the evolutionary drivers are sociological.

The most obvious research into this is the domestication of foxes. Friendly pups were bred with friendlier pups, mimicking what might have gone on in early wolf-human interactions (not breeding, necessarily, but rewarding the beggars), and the researchers found their friendly foxes getting floppy ears and maintaining other traits of puppyhood.

There is definitely a theory that the human ape is a result of this process--our extended childhood and our ability to continue learning, for instance, might be the result of neotenal evolution... so if we are the result of neotenal evolution, maybe one of the traits that became more prominent was our emotional dependence on parents being extended to an emotional dependence on leaders, priests, kings, and finally, bosses.

The two mechanisms would be individual and group level. On an individual level, people able to suck up to power would be given access to income, food, land, power, etc. On a group level, groups able to command larger and larger groups of people to work the land and/or die in combat, could conquer smaller groups unable to organize at a large scale (this problem is always ignored by utopians).

I'd say it's still helpful for a group to have autism in the population for several reasons. I was reading an anthropology book positing the development of the canoe as a series of minor improvements taking place over several centuries. And I thought, yeah, it was either that or a single autistic person with a special interest in boating. And sometimes society does need to hear the truth about itself, but for the most part, it gets along quite well on lies.