In this psychotherapy preoccupied culture analysis of the psyche of public figures is a dime a dozen, so I don't put too much stock in the assertion that Larry Summers might have Asperger's Syndrome. From where I stand, many psychological "diseases" are simply the tail of the distribution in terms of mental aptitudes and orientations, with an almost arbitrary determination of what the threshold for "dysfunction" might be. Nevertheless, two thoughts came to mind when this possibility in the case of Summers was brought to my attention.

First, the social and political complexities of multiculturalism, sensitivity awareness and the general catchall of political correctness might be too difficult for a large portion of the population to grasp (even those who are fluent in this discourse can get burned). In other words, when it comes to general intelligence, or even more narrowly defined logical-abstraction aptitude, Larry Summers is brilliant (with two Nobels in the family circle). On the other hand, as many have pointed out, as head of Harvard University it might not have been particularly "rational" for him to moot the ideas that he did. In other words, whether they were empirically justified or not, a socially aware person might have been able to intuit what not to say in a given circumstance because of personal self-interest. Larry Summers may lack that capacity for full fledged intentionality, the ability to anticipate how his own actions and words will ripple, cascade and reflect back through the various minds in a social system.

Update: I added a small addendum commenting on my skepticism about "group selection" below.

Simon Baron-Cohen in The Essential Difference reccounts how one of his Asperger's patients likened talking to defecating, once the words and phrases left his mouth, he no longer had any control where they landed or what effect they had on others. My personal experience is that "political correctness" (or its more traditionalist precusor "proper manners") is defined, promoted and elaborated by those who are to some extent hypersocially aware and verbally nuanced. These individuals might be creating a social system where the "rules of the game" might not be masterable by a large subset of the human population (it would be like demanding that all individuals know calculus to be able to participate in polite conversation).

Another point that I have often wondered about is whether people with "mental dysfunctions," or at least "socially irrational" behaviors (or suboptimal) might not be the drivers of technical, and to a lesser extent cultural, innovation. In other words, only individuals who are not risk averse because they do not accurately pick up the cues that signal that they have overstepped conventional bounds can transcend the norms and values that define a particular time. It seems entirely plausible to me that paradigm shifts would be driven by those who did not integrate or have great stakes in the previous paradigm to begin with. If you believe in group selection, this might have some straightforward implications about the "fitness" of various groups. Personally I suspect that balancing selection (ergo, individual/genic selection) can do the trick fine, though it might be less transparent to the lay person. As we've noted before though, the frequency of deleterious phenotypes might be increasing because of assortative mating, which undermines the panmictic mating that foster balancing selection.

Addendum: When it comes to sociology or an analysis of the cultural ecosystem, things get slippery. I somewhat regret my unelaborated skepticism of group selection, at least in the "inter-demic" fashion that I was imagining it. But let me illustrate my thinking with the following.

Many people assert that Western culture has been far more dynamic, innovative and productive that Sinic culture over the past 2.5 centuries because of its openness to variation in opinion, outlook and thought. In other words, Western culture leverages the ideas and inventions of its "oddballs," while Sinic culture tends to steer everyone toward the orthodoxy of the time. This does not imply that Sinic culture does not go through "paradigm shifts," but, it does suggest that the Western cultural dynamic is always fizzling with greater texture and dissonance of outlook. Not surprisingly, this detracts from the "harmony" which is the ideal in Sinic culture.

If you think of Western culture and Sinic culture as "demes" or "memes," how do you judge which one is more "fit"? Since the latter has been grafting on to Western motifs and methods for the past century I suspect that one could say that Western culture has been more "fit" as of late. When you look at it from this level it seems obvious that the nature of the groups matter.

But, if you look at it from the individual perspective it seems plausible to assert that even if the oddball strategy is risky, in Western society it might have a rather high payoff, enough so that oddballs are perpetuated, whether that be genetically, memetically or both. The differences between groups can easily be reduced to the fitness of individuals within both, in Sinic culture oddballs are penalized far more than Western culture (so goes the standard rendering).

The two perspectives do not necessarily conflict, but I would assert that the group selective model is more of a "blackbox" that obscures more than the individual level of assessment. The group is important and crucial, but in the sense that it is the environment, the ecosystem, in which individuals are embedded in. In such a conception, in the Western ecosystem oddballs have a much higher fitness than in the Sinic ecosystem. And since the individuals reshape and feedback into the ecosystem you have a loop which results in gross changes to the character of the ecosystem itself. An individual angle can, I believe, result in a more robust model and allow for more prediction of future cultural pathways.

Postscript: Though I have not stumbled on to any evidence that whites have a greater variance on g-loaded tests than East Asians, I am open to the conjecture that whites might have a greater variance in personality, or a greater diversity of morphs, than East Asians.