Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Brain size & genes   posted by Razib @ 8/02/2006 09:00:00 PM
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Two articles of interest. First, new results are going to be presented which shows no correlation between various forms of genes like microcephalin and ASPM and intelligence:

They also looked at the genes ASPM, MCPH1 and CDK5RAP2, which regulate brain size and activity
...

"Their findings [about a relation to brain size] were negative and they didn't find a relationship with two of the genes we were looking at," Dr Luciano said.

"We decided to take it a step further and look at intelligence and lo and behold we find a similar negative result."

I have heard of unpublished negative results looking for ASPM variation and its correlation with IQ, so no surprise. Also, Armand Leroi has a piece about microcephalics in Pakistan. Last year, when I interviewed him he mentioned to me that he was about to go off to Pakistan to record a documentary on this topic, so if you are British, watch for it (if it hasn't aired).

Related: Bruce Lahn's ASPM and Microcephalin papers.