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Wow! This has implications for human genetics (a study that originated partly in considering human body size measurements like those described in the article) t

Wow! This has implications for human genetics (a study that originated partly in considering human body size measurements like those described in the article) that I think most popular writers on human genetics have not taken into account. There was an article posted to Hacker News earlier this week that suggested, surely falsely in my opinion, that human genomes can be optimized for intelligence to such a degree that we won't even be able to estimate IQ scores for future individuals with the same kind of tests that we use now. I rather doubt it. Because of pleiotropic effects of genes, almost surely there isn't a gene shuffle that will massively increase human intelligence, but rather just strategies (as likely to be environmental as genetic) to improve average intelligence within the range already found in the worldwide human population. Similarly, imputation of "race" by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative, but for any trait of interest, a person who by both genome testing and known historical ancestry is categorized in some "race" category might have any degree of variance from "average" in the trait found in the whole human genome. It will be exciting to follow up on larger and larger data sets on these issues as human genomics projects continue.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
Similarly, imputation of "race" by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative, This is a nonsensical mischaracterization of both modern genetics and the theory of high dimensional vector spaces. The phenomenon the article is discussing is the fact that the mass near the center of a normal distribution approaches zero as the number of dimensions goes up, and that most of the mass lives a distance sqrt(N) from the origin. This does not imply that a) you can't have gaussians or other distributions which are separated from each other or b) that projections of one of these distributions can't have a different distribution than a projection from the other. Please go read Foundations of Data Science, chapters 1 and 2 before expounding on this topic further: http://research.microsoft.com/en-US/people/kannan/book-no-solutions-aug-21-2014.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-US/people/kannan/book-no-so... Can you clearly state what, precisely, you think this article proves about either classification, intelligence augmentation or group differences in specific traits?
- shanacarp 11y ago
  I can talk about some of this, if only because of some of the ethical dilemmas facing me and genome testing as of recent. Racial Groups as described by a geneticist vs say, a government doing polling on its citizens are different animals. Goverments == mostly sociological. An example would be Hispanic in the US, where growing up data collection would ask if someone was Hispanic, and now it asks if you are white vs non-white Hispanic. Meanwhile in say, Meanwhile, if someone crossed the border to Mexico, there is no such thing as Hispanic - you can be White, Mestizo (Indigenous-European hybrid), Indigenous, and Other. It is totally possible to live on the border of the US-Mexico, have reasons to commute across the US-Mexican border, have citizenship to both countries, and have totally different answers on your census depending on what country asked you about your race/ethnicity, because as can be clearly seen, the way that question is asked is different in mexico and the US to begin with. Let's talk about being Mezito as an idea. From a geneticist's point of view, it doesn't exist. (or at least, not yet, and it is unliekly to any time soon) Which is how 23 and me and buzzfeed manages to get this Gif off of one of Buzzfeed's employees, who very clearly feels he is half mexican (aka mezito) https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-01/21/16/enhanced/webdr01/anigif_enhanced-19351-1453410167-10.gif https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-01/21/1... In other words, there are no clusters that define "mexican"/mezito In order to have such clusters, you need to have long histories in one area, histories of inbreeding, and other major causes to make mutations pop selectively. Even with those mutations popping selectively, you also need those mutations/genes to be very trait specific in most cases/ultra selective. Otherwise, you are looking at junk. So, one of the reasons ashkenazim are testable as ashkenazim is because they have a very long history of inbreeding. So do the japanese compared to other asian groups, same with the Finnish, especially if you are Saami. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575505/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575505/ Still once these ibreeding/long history facts start to subside, you end up with whatever is the strongest trait set in a pure mendelian fashion. It is why there are plenty of ashkenazim who definitely decendants of the founder populations of ashkenazim who don't carry other sets of Ashkenazi marker genes, whereas there are ashkenazim where you can't tell who do carry these other genes. The other random sets come from other places (sex..mutations..) and are bred out with enough time. (Otherwise there would be many many more questions about how I exist, genetically speaking, since I should not be able to metabolize alcohol in about 1.5 hours...) However, most traits are not one gene == one trait. It's how the music plays together, especially in concert with epigentic factors. For many things involving "intelligence" (or actually lots of things for humans), we're looking at a non-mendellian inheritance pattern, including Genomic imprinting issues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting ). So while some gene related to "intelligence"/"thinness"/"insert something here" might be more observable among certain groups/populations, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist among other populations and some other factor, genetic, epigentic, or otherwise, is suppressing your view. This is why if/when you get involved with genetic research on humans, the ideal is to get the entire family (as much as possible) involved in tests - even if the original candidate comes from a human genetic isolate polpulation. There are otherwise broader concerns about power and sample size in the study, because you might be looking at something which is actually something else. http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v4/n2/full/gim200210a.html http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v4/n2/full/gim200210a.html (but, hey, what do I know...I had to ask geneticists and people doing research in this area when I found out my genome is worth something accidentally...)
jballanc 11y ago
This is old news for geneticists. Since Mendel and Punnet we've known that a.) traits don't average or "mix" from parent to child and b.) individual traits don't assort randomly. In a more modern context, the Human HapMap project (http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is working on mapping out just how many different assorting groups exist among human genes.
samstave 11y ago
You might like this article: http://blog.watsi.org/netflix-and-global-health/ http://blog.watsi.org/netflix-and-global-health/
- smartbit 11y ago
  Great article. Still the Netflix recommendations are awful and contradict my taste whatever I tried to help it understand the movies/series I liked and disliked. As result I subscribe one month, this month, to see House of Cards and then unsubscribe till next season. Maybe this average algorithm works for illnesses and mortality, IMHO it is not biased enough to my non-US taste/culture to be of any use for Netflix recommendations.
Houshalter 11y ago
Actually if anything this phenomenon would increase the probability of the super IQ thing. Intelligence isn't determined by one gene, but many thousands. Just like there are very few people who happen to be exactly average on dozens of different traits, there are very few people who happen to have the absolute best possible combination of genes to get max intelligence. That is, assuming there is some optimal combination of genes, it gets exponentially more unlikely any individual has it, the more genes there are that affect intelligence. Just like you would be unlikely to flip 1,000 heads in a row. In fact flipping even 600 heads out of a thousand, is exceedingly unlikely.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

Similarly, imputation of "race" by genome testing depends crucially on assuming that the average genome is informative, This is a nonsensical mischaracterization of both modern genetics and the theory of high dimensional vector spaces. The phenomenon the article is discussing is the fact that the mass near the center of a normal distribution approaches zero as the number of dimensions goes up, and that most of the mass lives a distance sqrt(N) from the origin. This does not imply that a) you can't have gaussians or other distributions which are separated from each other or b) that projections of one of these distributions can't have a different distribution than a projection from the other. Please go read Foundations of Data Science, chapters 1 and 2 before expounding on this topic further: http://research.microsoft.com/en-US/people/kannan/book-no-solutions-aug-21-2014.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-US/people/kannan/book-no-so... Can you clearly state what, precisely, you think this article proves about either classification, intelligence augmentation or group differences in specific traits?

shanacarp 11y ago
I can talk about some of this, if only because of some of the ethical dilemmas facing me and genome testing as of recent. Racial Groups as described by a geneticist vs say, a government doing polling on its citizens are different animals. Goverments == mostly sociological. An example would be Hispanic in the US, where growing up data collection would ask if someone was Hispanic, and now it asks if you are white vs non-white Hispanic. Meanwhile in say, Meanwhile, if someone crossed the border to Mexico, there is no such thing as Hispanic - you can be White, Mestizo (Indigenous-European hybrid), Indigenous, and Other. It is totally possible to live on the border of the US-Mexico, have reasons to commute across the US-Mexican border, have citizenship to both countries, and have totally different answers on your census depending on what country asked you about your race/ethnicity, because as can be clearly seen, the way that question is asked is different in mexico and the US to begin with. Let's talk about being Mezito as an idea. From a geneticist's point of view, it doesn't exist. (or at least, not yet, and it is unliekly to any time soon) Which is how 23 and me and buzzfeed manages to get this Gif off of one of Buzzfeed's employees, who very clearly feels he is half mexican (aka mezito) https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-01/21/16/enhanced/webdr01/anigif_enhanced-19351-1453410167-10.gif https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-01/21/1... In other words, there are no clusters that define "mexican"/mezito In order to have such clusters, you need to have long histories in one area, histories of inbreeding, and other major causes to make mutations pop selectively. Even with those mutations popping selectively, you also need those mutations/genes to be very trait specific in most cases/ultra selective. Otherwise, you are looking at junk. So, one of the reasons ashkenazim are testable as ashkenazim is because they have a very long history of inbreeding. So do the japanese compared to other asian groups, same with the Finnish, especially if you are Saami. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575505/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575505/ Still once these ibreeding/long history facts start to subside, you end up with whatever is the strongest trait set in a pure mendelian fashion. It is why there are plenty of ashkenazim who definitely decendants of the founder populations of ashkenazim who don't carry other sets of Ashkenazi marker genes, whereas there are ashkenazim where you can't tell who do carry these other genes. The other random sets come from other places (sex..mutations..) and are bred out with enough time. (Otherwise there would be many many more questions about how I exist, genetically speaking, since I should not be able to metabolize alcohol in about 1.5 hours...) However, most traits are not one gene == one trait. It's how the music plays together, especially in concert with epigentic factors. For many things involving "intelligence" (or actually lots of things for humans), we're looking at a non-mendellian inheritance pattern, including Genomic imprinting issues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting ). So while some gene related to "intelligence"/"thinness"/"insert something here" might be more observable among certain groups/populations, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist among other populations and some other factor, genetic, epigentic, or otherwise, is suppressing your view. This is why if/when you get involved with genetic research on humans, the ideal is to get the entire family (as much as possible) involved in tests - even if the original candidate comes from a human genetic isolate polpulation. There are otherwise broader concerns about power and sample size in the study, because you might be looking at something which is actually something else. http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v4/n2/full/gim200210a.html http://www.nature.com/gim/journal/v4/n2/full/gim200210a.html (but, hey, what do I know...I had to ask geneticists and people doing research in this area when I found out my genome is worth something accidentally...)

jballanc 11y ago

This is old news for geneticists. Since Mendel and Punnet we've known that a.) traits don't average or "mix" from parent to child and b.) individual traits don't assort randomly. In a more modern context, the Human HapMap project (http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov http://hapmap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is working on mapping out just how many different assorting groups exist among human genes.

samstave 11y ago

You might like this article: http://blog.watsi.org/netflix-and-global-health/ http://blog.watsi.org/netflix-and-global-health/

smartbit 11y ago
Great article. Still the Netflix recommendations are awful and contradict my taste whatever I tried to help it understand the movies/series I liked and disliked. As result I subscribe one month, this month, to see House of Cards and then unsubscribe till next season. Maybe this average algorithm works for illnesses and mortality, IMHO it is not biased enough to my non-US taste/culture to be of any use for Netflix recommendations.

Houshalter 11y ago

Actually if anything this phenomenon would increase the probability of the super IQ thing. Intelligence isn't determined by one gene, but many thousands. Just like there are very few people who happen to be exactly average on dozens of different traits, there are very few people who happen to have the absolute best possible combination of genes to get max intelligence. That is, assuming there is some optimal combination of genes, it gets exponentially more unlikely any individual has it, the more genes there are that affect intelligence. Just like you would be unlikely to flip 1,000 heads in a row. In fact flipping even 600 heads out of a thousand, is exceedingly unlikely.