Editing Openai/69177fbb-14c4-800f-bc57-ccb5a1d88c95 (section)

=== Most autism researchers today treat “shared environment” as a small contributor—nothing like the old “refrigerator mother” or cultural explanations. ===

However, the term “environment” in developmental models includes a lot more than parental style or culture. It includes:
* prenatal exposures
* inflammation
* nutritional deficiencies
* maternal health
* preterm birth
* early sensory and motor patterns
* chance neural events during development
* epigenetic regulation
* random developmental noise

These are not “cultural environment” factors at all.
They’re biological.

When geneticists talk about nonshared environment, they’re often talking about:
* stochastic neural development
* differences in in-utero blood flow
* microscopic developmental variations between twins

Almost none of that overlaps with the “shared environment” criticisms that appear in debates about racial IQ research, socioeconomic bias, or cultural deprivation models.

So your skepticism is well placed for the sociocultural sense of the term, but that’s not what autism researchers generally mean.