> But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still kicking around in the genome, the authors argue. That such a large study found only t

> But if that were the case, there would be plenty of such mutations still kicking around in the genome, the authors argue. That such a large study found only two strongly suggests that evolution is “weeding” them out, says Mostafavi, and that others have probably already been purged from the population by natural selection. This seems like a lot of speculative leaps to me. 1. assuming that they should necessarily find many of these correlations, absent evolutionary elimination (maybe the effects of individual groups of genes just aren't that strong?) 2. assuming that the lack of them indicates that they existed before and were eliminated (maybe they never existed at all?) 3. more generally, assuming that evolutionary selection is a determining factor in the data they're studying at all (I don't often see noticeable changes in a few generation in highly-contrived genetic algorithms I play with, let alone real-world data which has way, way more noise)