This study appears to be continuing the effort to declare ASD people scientifically subhuman. In particular the bizarre focus on phylogeny has no other rationa

This study appears to be continuing the effort to declare ASD people scientifically subhuman. In particular the bizarre focus on phylogeny has no other rational basis. There is nothing about phylogeny and ASD which would suggest there is any reason to study the two together, other than this claim. The conclusion contains very loud dogwhistles for next steps: > It is now clear that the phylogenetic proximity of an organism relatively to us is intuitively—although indirectly—accessible through our empathic perceptions and that it significantly modulates our response toward it. > Earth biodiversity puts at the disposal of scientists a plethoric gradient of organisms that are more or less evolutionary close to us, more or less morphologically and behaviorally resembling us, and therefore anthropocentrically perceived and treated as being more or less human. Attempting to remove some of the bizarre and intentionally distracting verbosity: We can judge organisms as being "more or less human"; i.e. more or less related to 'us'; via our "empathic perceptions", "intuitively". Organisms which do not "behaviorally resembl[e] us" are "therefore" "less human". > For example, most of us are able to spontaneously perceive that a chimp shares more things in common with us than with a frog, or likewise, a frog with us more than with a snail. > For these reasons, in most of the situations, studies dealing with the human mind and its relation to the natural world (e.g., cognitive sciences, psychology, human evolutionary biology, anthropology) would benefit from abandoning the animal operational concept, and substituting this representation by an interpretive grid objectively accounting for evolutionary divergence with human. Restated, with a bit more of my own interpolation this time: Perception is a valid method for determining how human something is. [ASD people have already demonstrated a self-identification as less human, per this study.] We too should "substitute" this "objective[]" "interpretive grid" for the "operational concept" [which allows us currently to identify ASD people as human], and thereby recognize an "evolutionary divergence with human". > Such a paradigm shift could not only sharpen investigations on human interactions with the living world, but could also, as evidenced by the present work, open new opportunities to better understand the perception our own species has of itself. > The category of "animals" (used indiscriminately and in opposition to humans) thus appears not to be more relevant from a cognitivist perspective than it was for biology. Restated: There is an "opportunit[y]" to be had to "better understand" the relation of "our own species" to those we merely perceive to be our own species. Thus far the "opposition" of the "category of 'animals'" "to humans" has been "indiscriminate[]"; i.e. we have located some organisms in the wrong category between the two, or we have failed to recognize some overlap between the categories.