...referring you - as I did - to the entire artical.

A few other random points raised:

-- The possibility that "people with superior technical
ability but poor social skills are meeting and mixing genes in
high-tech centres, and having offspring susceptible to a disorder
whose traits hold up an eerie mirror to our computerized culture".

-- Diagnoses of mental retardation may be going down (requires more study to determine for sure if there's a real correspondence) at the same rate that autism diagnoses are going up.

-- "Later, Dr. Siegel says that beyond genetics, this kind of confusion may be plaguing Silicon Valley. "These parents have come from all over the world here. They don't have extended family around them. They are raising children with no sense of what normal child behaviour is. And now there's this buzz out there about an 'autism epidemic' in the valley."

-- "Something in the environment has to be a trigger, Dr. Moyzis says. The autism mystery has to involve at least two culprits, he says, perhaps genes and a virus. "We have to stop thinking of genes and viruses separately," he says."

So yeah, it could be some kind of fraud (of course Californians are the only ones who would stoop so low).

Or it could be a change in the way neuropathologists are making their diagnoses.

Or it could be hysteria.

Or it could be a new means of selective breeding for this trait.

Or it could be something in the environment.

The only things that will help answer this question are study, time, and an open mind.