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You missed the next sentence: "They then checked any links they found against a second group of 14,700 eMERGE volunteers." So if any correlations were found, t
by Houshalter 11y ago
You missed the next sentence: "They then checked any links they found against a second group of 14,700 eMERGE volunteers."
So if any correlations were found, they basically did another study to replicate it. And that's a big sample size too. Many studies are published with far weaker correlations.
- azakai 11y agoThat's true, but the effect size here is also tiny - 1%. It's plausible it's statistically significant but completely meaningless. It's possible this study is novel mainly for the methodology, which as reported is the first wide-scale test of its nature. The media of course focus on the correlations because they are more sensational - it gets people thinking "am I depressed because I'm part neanderthal?"
- Houshalter 11y agoWell the base rate of being depressed is low, so an increase of 1% is kind of significant. If the base rate is only 1%, then a 1% increase means you are twice as likely to be depressed! I agree it's meaningless, in the sense that we have no idea what the cause is. It could be indirect, it could be random rather than anything special about neanderthals, it could be confounded with ethnicities that have higher neanderthal DNA, etc.
- azakai 11y agoI think it's a 1% explanatory effect of the total variance. That means that 1% of the variance in the population (not the size of the effect) is explainable by this factor. (Also, the base rate of depression is far more than 1%, see e.g. http://tech.mit.edu/V120/N3/dep1.3n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V120/N3/dep1.3n.html - it's around 17% for just a major depressive episode.)