. . . then certainly up there. If there's anything to this at all, it may be that children with the bad wiring in their brains that will cause identifiable autistic behavior later in life are predisposed to enjoy television instead of social interaction.

But really, this is total drek. Correlation is not causality, I thought everyone knew this, or does the author think the decline of petticoats has caused global warming, too?

Did the author of the article not even do the bare minimum of research? Does he know autism research began BEFORE television? And that there are historical cases like the Wild Boy of Averyon that predate electricity, not to mention TV?

Don't sweat it. It's only a study to establish correlation. It isn't at the stage of a hypothesis. The study also mentions other competing factors such as air quality and so forth. That said they aren't saying that autism is entirely a creation of television, and that no other instances of autism occurred before the advent of television, but they are showing a strong correlation between spikes in onset and times when television was being viewed in greater quantites by children. Take a look at a book called "The Plug In Drug." It's written like a soccer mom scare book, but the research didn't seem too shaky, and it draws similar conclusions.

Yeah, but it only takes one badly flawed study and you get people firmly convinced of voodoo science - look at how entrenched the mercury/vaccine myth is. Ah well, I suppose it could be worse. Unlike vaccines, withholding tv isn't likely to harm children.

Didn't you notice that Gregg Easterbrook wrote this article? He's the stupidest person given a byline in any publication in the US.

I'd have to see the original study to comment on it at all because Easterbrook can't be trusted to summarize it accurately