A Curious Case of  a Dog in the Night Time  is an interesting book because it gives us a chance to perceive the world from the vantage point of an autistic person.  One thing that I noticed was that Christopher's lack of social skills and the problems stemming from his disability all came about as a result of interacting with people without autism; I wonder if perhaps autistic people would get along with each other with far less incident.  Christopher also seemed to be a very productive and intelligent individual outside of the social realm.  It was actually very calming to read this book...  Generally my mind is filled with all sorts of distractions but reading from the Christopher's linear perspective seemed to clean things up a bit.  As a thought experiment, I think if you compared two separate populations - one composed solely of autistic individuals, and one composed solely of normal individuals, over time, the autistic population would outpace the other in terms of technological advancement.  Of course, this is purely hypothetical and based solely upon the description of one high-functioning autist as given by a man who does not suffer from the condition.  However, if we run with this assumption, the conclusion we reach is that social skills, although necessary at some point during our ancestry, have now outlived their usefulness and only serve to hold us back as a species.  Even if this was true, I could never see social aptitudes being eliminated from humanity - they are too important in the process of finding a mate.

On an unrelated note, one problem I did have with this book was that it wasn't written by someone with autism - the description of an autistic mind given by Mark Haddon can therefore not be completely accurate.  He did work with autistic people earlier in his career which does give him some insight, but I'm not sure how much he can know, considering the difficulty autistic people have with communication.