"Autistic" Children: New Hope for a Cure By Niko Tinbergen and Elizabeth A. Tinbergen (review)

But in what way is evolution a fact? Can we point to a datum ofevolution? Can we even point to its effect, much as we can point to a falling apple as the effect of gravity? We can point to differences in organisms, both extant and fossilized. But does this demonstrate the fact of evolution or the fact of diversity? Gould's paper does not clearly address this factual nature of evolution. The answer to this problem does not emerge from Gould's essay but rather from one by R. J. Cuffey that is also a reprint. In an excellent accounting of the paleontologie evidence for evolution, Cuffey defines evolution as ". . . the gradual and permanent change in the form and function of adult living organisms, of successive generations, over a long period of geologic time." This is a definition that points with striking clarity to the factual nature of evolution. The last essay is a reprint ofa 1936 piece by Sidney Ratner that makes some of us who have been involved in this controversy feel as if we are reinventing the wheel. Ratner chronicles the debate between religion and science that developed in the post-Darwinian world. The implied message of his essay is that we are fighting once again a battle fought many times before—and indeed, this is true. Ratner concluded in 1936 that "The progress of civilization in America will depend on a reassertion of scientific method as the only sound means of attaining a solid basis for security and happiness. All others are a snare and a delusion ." The problem with this declaration is that the scientific community generally has projected an inaccurate image of the scientific method. Frequently, as Günther Stent suggests in this volume, we have assumed that science gives us a religious or absolute view of knowledge. Frequently, we forget the tentative nature ofour theories. The creationist controversy has perhaps been valuable to society in that it has once again reminded us of the strengths and the weaknesses of the scientific method. Rivers Singleton, Jr. School ofLife and Health Sciences University ofDelaware, Newark, Delaware 19716 "Autistic" Children: New Hopefor a Cure. By ???? Tinbergen and Elizabeth A. Tinbergen. London, Boston, and Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983. Pp. 380. $39.50. It is difficult for the intelligent layman, let alone the medically trained, to recognize the assumption lying behind the ideas that the authors of this book hold. In a recent book, Kuhn has alerted us to the existence of thought paradigms that enable people to hold on to outdated theories or unrecognized assumptions. Changes in thought occur when we switch to new paradigms brought about by new authorities. This comes when we come to pay a predominant amount of attention to them. This is necessary because the changes themselves may be so radical that there is nothing in the experience of a person, or in what he or she may have read, to indicate the sort ofchange that is likely to come about. For example, in the sixteenth century in England, the changing seasons were thought of as essential for man to sow and reap the harvest, even though some 636 Book Reviews people had been to the Equator. In the seventeenth century, everyone knew that the seasons were due to the way the earth circled the sun. The Tinbergens' book sets out to establish a new way of thinking about autism and to propose that this is a more comprehensive way ofbringing about a cure. It does so on the basis of the ethological knowledge to which Niko Tinbergen has contributed so much. Therefore, the Tinbergens' book must not be judged on the extent to which they offer proof of the validity of their ethological view of "autism" but must be seen as a challenge to the existing ideas on which current therapy is based. As they write, "there is as yet no comprehensive hypothesis about the nature of being autistic." They offer one, and therefore the book is a serious and valuable contribution to the subject, and one which should be used as the starting point for all future theoretical argument on the subject. This is because the ethological approach provides a...