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> we'd have been able to address a simple question I asked when I was 18: why is my nose this funny shape that doesn't look like other people's noses? What gen

> we'd have been able to address a simple question I asked when I was 18: why is my nose this funny shape that doesn't look like other people's noses? What genes "encode" the "blueprint"? And to be honest, we're still really far from answering questions like that, but through a combination of data collection and machine learning, scientists actually are beginning to understand the complex process that leads to funny nose shapes. IIRC there was some research that could predict facial shapes from genomes (but it's not a popular direction of research since it touches various taboo topics too closely for many people's comfort), and notably it does not require understanding complex process of how e.g. noses are formed, just data about sufficiently many people to detect correlation patterns.

dekhn 3y ago
Yes, it's been a painful lesson for me to learn: you can often build a good-enough approximation of the underlying physics to make good-enough predictions, even without modelling all the molecular details directly, as long as you have enough data, good algorithms, and fast computers. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-genom-120121-102607 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-genom... is a review of research in this area. I don't think it's particularly controversial because realistically, the underlying data supports the hypothesis that facial features are hereditable and then do association studies to find plausible candidate multivariate genomic features that predict them accurately. I think that's far enough from controversial "Race science" that it's hard for people to make reasonable criticisms of this research.