I’m relinking to this old Wired piece about Aspgerger’s syndrome among children of tech workers again. The article asks, “Are math-and-tech genes to blame?” I post this link because I want readers to think about overdominance a bit, defined as:
The condition of a heterozygote having a phenotype that is more pronounced or better adapted than that of either homozygote.
Asperger’s, like schizophrenia, is probably a highly polygenic disease, if there is a genetic component. Nevertheless, assortive mating might be bringing together a greater frequency of individuals who carry “Asperger’s genes” today than in the past (the implication of the above article). Readers of GNXP often wonder if diseases like schizophrenia are simply byproducts of the beneficial properties of various genes in smaller doses in relatives (ie; they have 20 genes instead of 100 that are “on” or “off” for the normal/disease tendencies). But, what about the flip side, perhaps we are gaining from assortive mating? More later….
Posted by razib at 06:43 AM