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Michael Fitzgerald and Brendan O'Brien, Genius Genes: How Asperger Talents Change the World. Shawnee Mission, Kansas: Autism Asperger Publishing Company, 2007.
The primary thesis of this book is that the genius of many famous and creative individuals is due to their having Asperger Syndrome. The secondary thesis of this book is that
genius cannot be explained by environmental factors. Although these factors may be important in creating the conditions for genius to flourish, it is largely genetic in origin, as is Asperger Syndrome. Possible links between the two can be investigated by examining biographical material (p. viii).
The balance of this book is the presentation of 21 brief biographies of famous people who varying degrees of evidence indicate with varying degrees of reliability that varying degrees of Asperger Syndrome occurs in people with varying degrees of "genius". The authors argue that some of the 21 cases had Asperger Syndrome, others had Asperger's disorder (the differences are never precisely defined), still others had autism, and still others had something along the continuum of autism-Asperger spectrum disorder: Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Charles de Gaulle, Norbert Wiener, Charles Lindbergh, and Paul Erdos (Asperger Syndrome), Charles Darwin, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Nikola Tesla, David Hilbert, John Broadus Watson, Bernard Lee Montgomery, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Kurt Godei (Asperger disorder), Thomas Jefferson (autism), Henry Cavendish ("autistic-like traits"), and Charles Babbage (hyperkinetic syndrome).
The psychohistorian will find little that is instructive in these 21 brief cases. The sources are usually very limited in number and depth resulting in a Wikipedia-like treatment of the biographical information of some rather complicated individuals. Often the case over-relies upon one source. The first case, Archimedes, is stretching the meager evidence so far that only the most fragile links of Asperger Syndrome to genius can be made. This poor link weakens the chain of argument of the book's primary the- sis. The second case jumps some 1,800 years to Isaac Newton. The reader asks: Was there no Asperger Syndrome genius in all of this time? If...