I do not want to believe that this is legit.

Trigger Warning: Not sure exactly what, but I feel like it needs one. 

I really don't. But check out the names and institutions of the people who wrote this paper. I really think this is a legitimate paper. Which is a problem. Here's why:

• They ask if autism is part of a family of diseases, which would imply that they are considering autism a disease. I thought people who were actually doing research at respected places were aware that autism is NOT a disease. It's a developmental disability. There is a difference...
• The introduction talks about preventing autism. While they're not talking about preventing it by way of abortion, but rather by way of fixing any environmental factors, I am rather leery whenever I hear people talking about preventing autism. The aborting autistic fetuses if we know they're going to be autistic method is just too much of a worry for any talk of preventing autism to not scare me.
• They assume autism is new. I wouldn't be so sure. It's not like they had a name for all the people who never spoke in antiquity, and there have always been hermits, and there have always been people who were different. Just because we don't know that something autistic spectrum is what the difference was doesn't mean that it isn't! And some of those differences... kinda sound like something autistic spectrum. Besides which, there are quite a few autistic spectrum people where the only BIG PROBLEM part is the sensory issues. Sure, the other things are weird/occasionally cause trouble, but the biggest thing is the sensory issues. Given what the common ones seem to be, avoiding those ones in a rural society seems not that hard, and such that some people might not even know they had them. So the idea that autistic spectrum stuff is all new needs more evidence before I'll believe it. The whole paper rests on that assumption, though.
• They assume that all of the others didn't exist before either. Most of them did; they were just much rarer. And the ones that are fatal when left untreated were, well, fatal. And mild asthma would have been the same kind of not much of a much that it is now. So... I'm not sure that hypothesis holds up quite as well as they think it does. I mean, yes, asthma is definitely MUCH more common now. But that doesn't mean it was non-existent. (I'm not saying these ones don't mostly come from where they think it does. It's just that they don't completely come from there.)
• They ask about the possibility of curing autism by making the environment better. I... don't even know what to say to this. It sounds too much like the people who think a gluten free diet will recover their kid from autism. Because it just doesn't work that way.
• I want to know how they got their prevalence rates for "2 US born parents" and for "2 foreign-born parents." Because if it's by checking who is diagnosed, white, citizen, and speaking the dominant language privileges are going to be going on in those statistics and I don't trust them. If it's by checking a bunch of kids and who meets the criteria, maybe. MAYBE.

Of course, since absolutely everything is linked to autism, including being alive, they can probably come up with whatever links they want. I just don't need to trust or believe it, which is not something I love feeling the need to say about a paper written by people from a university like Duke. Is there anyone I can actually trust about autism stuff? Anywhere? Please?