> It has always bothered me that by "spectrum" they mean not the sort of continuous thing that spectra actually are, but instead some disjoint set of "colors" any one of which might describe a person. That's called a partition, and its in an entirely separate thing.

Hmm, what are these 'colors' in your framing? I don't think anyone feels that ASD comprises totally distinct, 'disjoint' descriptions. It's true that there are multiple parameters along which one may vary, but that's true of any human syndromic disease, and probably true for any human disease, in general.

Here's a popular press article that talks about a very recent framing of autism that uses clinical and genetic data:

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/09/new-study-reveal...