6 ms·

Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentia

Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination. For example you can spend your career mapping hundreds of small-effect variants linked to intelligence or phenotypes that lead to increased likelihood of certain behaviours. You can even publish a study showing that people who carry a certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public in a certain region. You can also publish a population genetics study showing that humans have relatively easily computed genetic structure (see: 23andMe ancestry) because countless alleles are practically fixed in certain populations relative to others due to selection or founder effects, or are prevalent enough that if you have a segment of your genome with enough of them them you must have had an ancestor from a certain region. What you can’t do is combine these concepts into any uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans.

Cornbilly 2y ago
Which uncomfortable findings are you referring to? Apparently, they’re also hard to plainly state on an anonymous forum as well. Weird.
- ahoka 2y ago
  That confusing cause and effect would not be proper science? Just guessing.
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    I'm not sure? I think it's even deeper than confusing cause and effect. I mean, maybe I'm missing some information, but the comment says: a study showing that people who carry a certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes” The potential fundamental error there is the whole multiple independent variable thing. The study was likely designed from the outset without regard to the fundamentals of the scientific method. Which is a bigger issue than just confusing cause and effect. It gives other scientists a suspicion that the people doing the study aren't even aware of the potential confounding nature of the design? The people doing the study will of course call the "snobbish" scientists "anti-racists" for pointing these things out. But scientists are neither "racist" nor "anti-racist". The conclusions follow from the data via the scientific method, or the conclusions don't follow. A good scientist will not presume, a priori, what the conclusions are. In this instance, scientists can be forgiven for concluding that the findings don't follow. Scientists are better described as Scientific Method Fundamentalists. If they believe in anything, it is the scientific method. Everything else? Well, yeah, you will need to convince them. The good news is you can do that, but you have to use the scientific method to do so. If you don't, they rightfully dismiss you out of hand. I think the people who push these studies are misunderstanding the dismissal of their "findings" as antagonism to their conclusions. And on the other side, there are probably scientists who are not even bothering to explain the nature of their problem to them. There's probably a sense of, "It's a waste of time to talk to them", on both sides.
    - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
      >> The study was likely designed from the outset without regard to the fundamentals of the scientific method. Oh yeah, you will definitely need to assume that!
- transcriptase 2y ago
  That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to be found at observably different frequencies between populations than the ones used to create an ancestry report. Presumably because racists would ignore all the mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
  - dkural 2y ago
    Looking for intelligence differences between people of different skin color makes as much sense as looking for intelligence differences between tall and short people. You seem to believe in distinct "races" as a genetic concept, whereas all I see in the data is correlations with place-of-collection. The more people you sample from, the more any clustering will literally start looking like a physical map of the world.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      So, what would you say about looking for intelligence differences between people of different ancestry? We know quite well that some traits are concentrated in a single place or two: marathon winners come disproportionately from the Rift Valley in Kenya, sickle cell disease is mostly a West African trait and Tay-Sachs disease is concentrated among the Ashkenazim. Few people dispute the above. The really controversial question is whether there are any such differences from the neck up, so to say.
      - guelo 2y ago
        If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation. In other words, the differences within each population would be much greater than between the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal. So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?
dani__german 2y ago
Which is a hilarious fact in itself. A common refrain among non religious people is that religion is false, self contradictory, or something similar. And yet the large overlap between these people and anti-racists cannot face the evidence that evolution applies to humans, and that genetic differences can have measurable effects. This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs, that somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that evolution is real. Two completely incompatible beliefs (or concepts, if you can't stand such a word). Prevalence of the MAOA gene is quite interesting indeed. To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we are all exactly equal in nature. That our only differences come from nurture. The other belief (or "non-skeptically accepted prospect") is that humanity has evolved, first from africa, then in disparate populations spread over the entire land area of the earth, being subject to many varied natural environments and thus selections. Such natural selections MUST select for different traits, often wildly different. Such traits cannot be contained to "skin color only" a meaningless, arbitrary restriction.
- Cornbilly 2y ago
  > To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we are all exactly equal in nature. I’m not sure how “racism is bad” requires the idea that “we are all equal by nature”. “Racism is bad” means that the law should treat us equally and that you should not treat people differently based solely on their skin color.
  - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    [dead]
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    You're referring to the normal and reasonable view, but I think most are targeting this weird new(ish) concept, heavily intertwined into politics, that any and all differences between groups are due to biases or other environmental factors. So if you see that e.g. one group is lagging behind in math then that is taken at face value as evidence that 'math is racist.' A search for that exact phrase will turn up a million hits, pushed by some very big entities, if you want to go down this rabbit hole. But if you don't already know about this stuff - just don't. The amount of stupidity and transparent divide+conquer politics in it all is just nauseating. On the other hand it does have contemporary relevance as a lot of the funding for this stuff is being scrapped, and it's nice to understand what we're 'losing.'
BugsJustFindMe 2y ago
> have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public If your goal is to show that the gene variant causes violence, you probably need to compare violent vs nonviolent prison populations, not prison populations vs general public. We already know that there are aspects of genetics that affect likelihood of being imprisoned, all else being equal.
jltsiren 2y ago
For most, it's a simple defense mechanism. Some topics are more likely to attract assholes than others. If you don't want to be drawn into a political debate with assholes, you don't study those topics. Better to study something that can be studied without being forced to make a political stand. That would not happen in the ideal world, where people try to avoid misinterpreting and overgeneralizing results. But controversial topics always attract people acting in bad faith. Even most of those acting in good faith are unused to the level of precision and pedantry required to make justified conclusions from data.
- mmooss 2y ago
  They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise. Race as we culturally define it (which varies significantly over time and location) doesn't respresent differences in fact, but rather the things that are most obvious to our perception - e.g., skin color. There's no coincidence that what we see most easily - skin color - is somehow a strong indicator. It's also a misunderstanding of statistics to think that differences will apply to individuals. These aren't two completely separate distributions, but rather distributions that overlap in different ways for different factors that impact outcomes in complicated an often unknown ways. Science and genetics are not that simple. > That would not happen in the ideal world Our world is far from that, sadly. What has caused more damage in history than racism - wars, massacres, slavery, oppression (including mass incarceration), endless lifetimes and generations lost to neglect? There have been no wars, slavery, or massacres due to anti-racism.
  - rsaarelm 2y ago
    > They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise. They go "hey, cool, we can get a paper out of this" https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...
api 2y ago
> Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination. History has shown this to be wise. If human beings -- as individuals or as a group -- come to view themselves as superior to others, the next step is always abuse, enslavement, or war. Civilization tries very hard to suppress this for the same reason that it suppresses some of the wilder expressions of unbridled human sexuality, physical aggression, etc. Moral issues aside, there’s certain stuff that just breaks everything if you let it run unchecked. A truly intelligent being could look dispassionately at the various distributions of abilities and other differences in its population and deal with this maturely and rationally. We aren't capable of this yet. I don’t think we can handle it emotionally. This is an area where my opinions have evolved as I’ve gotten older and seen more of the world. We do, in fact, need taboos around certain things. I don’t think there should be too many of them, but there’s areas where the need has been repeatedly demonstrated.
mannyv 2y ago
What's amusing is that according to the literature height can be inherited but intelligence can not be. More generally, any characteristic that can be used to denigrate (or promote) a group is not inheritable. It's the fiction that keeps genetics moving along.
- transcriptase 2y ago
  Doubly amusing because in nearly every social animal (dogs, cats, horses, pigs, primates, etc) it’s universally accepted that intelligence, curiosity, sociability, aggression, territoriality, impulsivity, problem-solving, persistence, reward motivation… … are all highly heritable. Humans are miraculously, according to the experts, the sole and unquestionable exception in the animal kingdom.
  - cameronh90 2y ago
    Academia has been claiming otherwise actually. There have been a bunch of studies trying to overturn the idea that dog behaviour is genetic, and turn it into a purely environmental thing. My guess is they’re worried that if we accept it’s true for animals , there’s not much of a leap to assuming it’s true for humans. I don’t know enough about it to say whether the studies are BS or not, but as an experienced animal keeper, claims that it’s not heritable goes so heavily against my lived experience that I can’t reconcile it with reality.
sangnoir 2y ago
> What you can’t do is combine these concepts into any uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans. You can[1], and it's been done. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

Cornbilly 2y ago

Which uncomfortable findings are you referring to? Apparently, they’re also hard to plainly state on an anonymous forum as well. Weird.

ahoka 2y ago
That confusing cause and effect would not be proper science? Just guessing.
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  I'm not sure? I think it's even deeper than confusing cause and effect. I mean, maybe I'm missing some information, but the comment says: a study showing that people who carry a certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes” The potential fundamental error there is the whole multiple independent variable thing. The study was likely designed from the outset without regard to the fundamentals of the scientific method. Which is a bigger issue than just confusing cause and effect. It gives other scientists a suspicion that the people doing the study aren't even aware of the potential confounding nature of the design? The people doing the study will of course call the "snobbish" scientists "anti-racists" for pointing these things out. But scientists are neither "racist" nor "anti-racist". The conclusions follow from the data via the scientific method, or the conclusions don't follow. A good scientist will not presume, a priori, what the conclusions are. In this instance, scientists can be forgiven for concluding that the findings don't follow. Scientists are better described as Scientific Method Fundamentalists. If they believe in anything, it is the scientific method. Everything else? Well, yeah, you will need to convince them. The good news is you can do that, but you have to use the scientific method to do so. If you don't, they rightfully dismiss you out of hand. I think the people who push these studies are misunderstanding the dismissal of their "findings" as antagonism to their conclusions. And on the other side, there are probably scientists who are not even bothering to explain the nature of their problem to them. There's probably a sense of, "It's a waste of time to talk to them", on both sides.
  - Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    >> The study was likely designed from the outset without regard to the fundamentals of the scientific method. Oh yeah, you will definitely need to assume that!
transcriptase 2y ago
That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to be found at observably different frequencies between populations than the ones used to create an ancestry report. Presumably because racists would ignore all the mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
- dkural 2y ago
  Looking for intelligence differences between people of different skin color makes as much sense as looking for intelligence differences between tall and short people. You seem to believe in distinct "races" as a genetic concept, whereas all I see in the data is correlations with place-of-collection. The more people you sample from, the more any clustering will literally start looking like a physical map of the world.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    So, what would you say about looking for intelligence differences between people of different ancestry? We know quite well that some traits are concentrated in a single place or two: marathon winners come disproportionately from the Rift Valley in Kenya, sickle cell disease is mostly a West African trait and Tay-Sachs disease is concentrated among the Ashkenazim. Few people dispute the above. The really controversial question is whether there are any such differences from the neck up, so to say.
    - guelo 2y ago
      If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation. In other words, the differences within each population would be much greater than between the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal. So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?

dani__german 2y ago

Which is a hilarious fact in itself. A common refrain among non religious people is that religion is false, self contradictory, or something similar. And yet the large overlap between these people and anti-racists cannot face the evidence that evolution applies to humans, and that genetic differences can have measurable effects. This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs, that somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that evolution is real. Two completely incompatible beliefs (or concepts, if you can't stand such a word). Prevalence of the MAOA gene is quite interesting indeed. To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we are all exactly equal in nature. That our only differences come from nurture. The other belief (or "non-skeptically accepted prospect") is that humanity has evolved, first from africa, then in disparate populations spread over the entire land area of the earth, being subject to many varied natural environments and thus selections. Such natural selections MUST select for different traits, often wildly different. Such traits cannot be contained to "skin color only" a meaningless, arbitrary restriction.

Cornbilly 2y ago
> To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we are all exactly equal in nature. I’m not sure how “racism is bad” requires the idea that “we are all equal by nature”. “Racism is bad” means that the law should treat us equally and that you should not treat people differently based solely on their skin color.
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago
  [dead]
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  You're referring to the normal and reasonable view, but I think most are targeting this weird new(ish) concept, heavily intertwined into politics, that any and all differences between groups are due to biases or other environmental factors. So if you see that e.g. one group is lagging behind in math then that is taken at face value as evidence that 'math is racist.' A search for that exact phrase will turn up a million hits, pushed by some very big entities, if you want to go down this rabbit hole. But if you don't already know about this stuff - just don't. The amount of stupidity and transparent divide+conquer politics in it all is just nauseating. On the other hand it does have contemporary relevance as a lot of the funding for this stuff is being scrapped, and it's nice to understand what we're 'losing.'

BugsJustFindMe 2y ago

> have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public If your goal is to show that the gene variant causes violence, you probably need to compare violent vs nonviolent prison populations, not prison populations vs general public. We already know that there are aspects of genetics that affect likelihood of being imprisoned, all else being equal.

jltsiren 2y ago

For most, it's a simple defense mechanism. Some topics are more likely to attract assholes than others. If you don't want to be drawn into a political debate with assholes, you don't study those topics. Better to study something that can be studied without being forced to make a political stand. That would not happen in the ideal world, where people try to avoid misinterpreting and overgeneralizing results. But controversial topics always attract people acting in bad faith. Even most of those acting in good faith are unused to the level of precision and pedantry required to make justified conclusions from data.

mmooss 2y ago
They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise. Race as we culturally define it (which varies significantly over time and location) doesn't respresent differences in fact, but rather the things that are most obvious to our perception - e.g., skin color. There's no coincidence that what we see most easily - skin color - is somehow a strong indicator. It's also a misunderstanding of statistics to think that differences will apply to individuals. These aren't two completely separate distributions, but rather distributions that overlap in different ways for different factors that impact outcomes in complicated an often unknown ways. Science and genetics are not that simple. > That would not happen in the ideal world Our world is far from that, sadly. What has caused more damage in history than racism - wars, massacres, slavery, oppression (including mass incarceration), endless lifetimes and generations lost to neglect? There have been no wars, slavery, or massacres due to anti-racism.
- rsaarelm 2y ago
  > They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise. They go "hey, cool, we can get a paper out of this" https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...

api 2y ago

> Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination. History has shown this to be wise. If human beings -- as individuals or as a group -- come to view themselves as superior to others, the next step is always abuse, enslavement, or war. Civilization tries very hard to suppress this for the same reason that it suppresses some of the wilder expressions of unbridled human sexuality, physical aggression, etc. Moral issues aside, there’s certain stuff that just breaks everything if you let it run unchecked. A truly intelligent being could look dispassionately at the various distributions of abilities and other differences in its population and deal with this maturely and rationally. We aren't capable of this yet. I don’t think we can handle it emotionally. This is an area where my opinions have evolved as I’ve gotten older and seen more of the world. We do, in fact, need taboos around certain things. I don’t think there should be too many of them, but there’s areas where the need has been repeatedly demonstrated.

mannyv 2y ago

What's amusing is that according to the literature height can be inherited but intelligence can not be. More generally, any characteristic that can be used to denigrate (or promote) a group is not inheritable. It's the fiction that keeps genetics moving along.

transcriptase 2y ago
Doubly amusing because in nearly every social animal (dogs, cats, horses, pigs, primates, etc) it’s universally accepted that intelligence, curiosity, sociability, aggression, territoriality, impulsivity, problem-solving, persistence, reward motivation… … are all highly heritable. Humans are miraculously, according to the experts, the sole and unquestionable exception in the animal kingdom.
- cameronh90 2y ago
  Academia has been claiming otherwise actually. There have been a bunch of studies trying to overturn the idea that dog behaviour is genetic, and turn it into a purely environmental thing. My guess is they’re worried that if we accept it’s true for animals , there’s not much of a leap to assuming it’s true for humans. I don’t know enough about it to say whether the studies are BS or not, but as an experienced animal keeper, claims that it’s not heritable goes so heavily against my lived experience that I can’t reconcile it with reality.

sangnoir 2y ago

> What you can’t do is combine these concepts into any uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans. You can[1], and it's been done. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism