I meant that they could sequence the gene in each patient - not necessarily in order to functionally characterize further polymorphisms that are yet-uncharacterized, but simply in order to test for all the functional polymorphisms known to date. I didn't literally mean "all polymorphisms," so I should have used different words. 
 
If there are only a few sites of known functionally-polymorphic loci within the gene, maybe they can all be tested for in some way that's more economical than full sequencing of BRCA. But my point is that, at worst, it doesn't seem very expensive to Sanger-sequence the whole son of a gun with multiple coverage - at least not as a fraction of the $3,000 they are charging. Unless I have somehow misunderstood something about Sanger sequencing. So I am mystified by their desire to incur ill will, pay out for lawyers, expose rather questionable IP to lawsuits and the court of public opinion, decline to improve their product in a way that should increase its appeal, and fail to help certain patients. 
 
I must be missing something, right? Maybe they fear regulatory approval problems because some of the known/proposed functional polymorphisms are of debatable significance? I donno. I guess there's at least some chance they could just be really dumb.

Dang... gene patents are a little weird to me, simply because it's not immediately clear to my mind that they will benefit the public (which is supposed to be the primary purpose of intellectual property rights, ja?). 
 
But regardless, for $3,000 why don't they just sequence the whole gene and thus cover all polymorphisms, rather than have their name be pilloried - not to mention the lawyer fees and the risk of losing the suit. Do they just love the feeling of blowing a hole in their own foot, or what? 
 
"For a user of an average core facility the cost of [Sanger] sequencing [for each several-hundred-base read] varies from $6$ to 23, with average cost of about $9 to $12, or approximately $0.01/base. [published Sept 2005]" 
 
Myriad, if you read this and implement my plan, please send me a million bucks.

I think Olivia Judson blogged about 8 months ago on a taxon or taxa where there are fakers who do the sex rigmarole to obtain benefits, but then produce clonal offspring. I think there was even one where sperms actually destroy the entire maternal genome of the oocyte, thus the female gives birth to clones of the male.

As for Cochrane's hypothesis, I feel very underconfident about the science behind it - in fact, I am having a hard time trying to figure out how they came to their conclusions - there is no correlation between the phenomena - such phenomena has been adequately explained by other disciplines and his work adds nothing to the field of evopsych, except controversial debate. 
 
You've got a sketch of an opinion, but as written it seems pretty thin on concrete facts.

I wonder how they were able to do the IQ study on ASPM and microcephalin.

To Ferguson, that was a dangerous idea. There may indeed be versions of genes that are unique to Ashkenazi Jews, but it would be impossible, he said, to prove that those genes are responsible for higher IQs. 
 
Uh... that's a very interesting and extremely unique position. 
 
I have to wonder if this guy could have been mischaracterized? But the journalist did not seem incompetent.

> It's certainly possible to have both social skills AND intellectual talent. In fact I've always thought that the two are positively correlated 
 
I might add, I was talking about achievement rather than aptitude (talent). There are loads of people in the top percentile for g who have little or nothing in the way of, as I put it, "arcane knowledge".  
 
Roissy is a nice paragon of a highly talented anti-dork. His enviable degree and volume of wit and overall writerly grace put him at one in 100,000 for that trait, or perhaps quite a bit higher. He's less distinguished, yet still quite distinguished in his aptitude for intuitive psychology and rough intuitive sociology. He might have a shot at being a great sociopsychological novelist if he were to gain an arcane immersion in rhetoric and novel craft. (Shelley, a classic super-dork who was hounded by bullies as a student, was said to read 16 hours a day during at least part of his life, and it paid off if "To a skylark" is any indication). But for now, at least, Roissy's writing, though influential, is more on a recreational-ephemeral level thanks in part to the more "red-blooded" pursuits (endless tail-chasing) made possible by his very high social acumen.

> Eric, do you think it's possible to have "mastery of arcane fields" and still not be a social dope? 
 
Definitely. I was only speaking of a modest correlation, so plenty of strong exceptions would exist. Also, it was only an intuition, so it could be wrong - but even if it is wrong, it could still explain "geek pride" even so, if other people share the same wrong intuition. 
 
> In fact I've always thought that the two are positively correlated 
 
It's awfully hard to come at it formally with good clarity. For one thing, to many peoples' intuition it seems like there is an "immediate" or purely-intuitive social acumen which feels like it might be one of the least g-correlated of complex mental functions (which is not to say it is not g-correlated at all). But things end up getting blurred to a degree, because, for one thing, high-g people are more able to use general intelligence to contemplate/analyze social matters and thus augment "brute intuitive social acumen".

I would be shocked if CEOs on average have submedian social acumen, which is the definition of geekiosity Razib was using. Engineers, maybe. Comp sci people definitely. People who read very large amounts of science and philosophy out of pure interest, definitely. Sci fi lovers, indubitably.

> I didn't consider that anyone would take pride in it 
 
People understand or sense that there's a trade-off between social pursuits and arcane ones. Thus, poor social acumen and neglect of its cultivation conduce to mastery of arcane fields.

Palamas, very diverse people who experimented with meditation, psychedelic drugs, lucid dreaming, prolonged fasting or sleep deprivation, or have near-death experiences or some kind of psychosis, are absolutely adamant that they had a "spiritual" or mystical experience - and many of them have supernatural beliefs and many (though probably fewer) don't. Persinger also did experiments using transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce spiritual experiences, though his work has been disputed by a group that tried to replicate it.  
 
I'm sure one can argue about whether they /really/ had spiritual or mystical experiences, but I don't want to argue about it; I'm just saying.  
 
Something about today's Dawkins-like aggressive anti-religionism does rub me the wrong way. Somehow it's much more OK with me when Nietzsche does it. I guess he had the comprehensiveness and the passion that gave him the right, and Dawkins frankly doesn't.

Thanks TGGP, that was interesting.  
 
Regarding evo psych, it's a discipline that offers us some nicely Popperean/falsifiable hypotheses. But I'll bet there will always be a good number of evo psych-informed hypotheses that are very poorly falsifiable, yet far too interesting not to think about. Clearly, this irritates many people. 
 
I'm sure plenty of people here, like me, are not so austere as to dismiss all intuitive and introspective psychology, in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Pascal, etc (no Freud for me though, danke schoen). Why should non-falsifiable evo psych ideas be any less acceptable than intuitive psych ideas, which of course are all pretty subjective and unfalsifiable?  
 
So, people will just give up on saying that the entire discipline of evo psych is popperean or is not popperean. It will be seen as mixed, which is fine as long as people are clear about what's what. Or perhaps it will separate into popperean and non-popperean traditions with different names.

Brett, I'm no authority in philosophy but I always thought "rationalism" was opposed to empiricism, kind of a Descartes v Hume thing. I don't see what your predicates, linearity or anthropocentrism, have to do with this.  
 
Actually, I always sort of figured the usage of "rationality" rather than "rationalism" at Overcoming Bias made sense precisely because they aren't anti-empirical. They seem just as empirical as is typical in modern science - namely, about as empirical as you can get. 
 
I've greatly enjoyed reading OB - and I certainly haven't read all of it - but so far I can't really agree that what's going on there is even close to revolutionarily rational, vs the tradition that's absorbed by most elite natural scientists of the modern world. I never used to know what Bayesian reasoning was, for example, but it seems like most very smart biologists use it without necessarily knowing what it is qua Bayes' formalization of it. I could be wrong.

How can they be a cult of rationality, when they seem to regularly cite the long-recognized potential for conflict between rationality and eudaemonia. 
 
There is something slightly silly, though, about their holding discussions about whether or not they themselves are a cult.

The authors carried out a meta-analysis to evaluate the magnitude, shape, and modifiers of such an association. The search found 51 prevalence studies, five incidence studies, and four persistence studies meeting the criteria. [...] Results indicated that low-SES individuals had higher odds of being depressed (odds ratio = 1.81, p < 0.001), but the odds of a new episode (odds ratio = 1.24, p = 0.004) were lower than the odds of persisting depression (odds ratio = 2.06, p < 0.001). A dose-response relation was observed for education and income. Socioeconomic inequality in depression is heterogeneous and varies according to the way psychiatric disorder is measured, to the definition and measurement of SES, and to contextual features such as region and time. Nonetheless, the authors found compelling evidence for socioeconomic inequality in depression.

There was, in the 18th century I believe, a man who had memorized the entire Bible. Not only could he recite it in order, if you named a verse to him, however obscure, he could tell you what it said. 
 
 
"A friend of the author's had met a man who knew the Mahabharata (six times the length of the Bible) by heart." 
 
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/20/061120fa_fact_dalrymple 
 
The abstract doesn't specify whether he knew every word verbatim. I read the article in 2006 but I don't have access now.

Mouse - 
But the B. subtilis laboratory strains of today are a shadow of their former selves. Years and years of manipulation in the laboratory has robbed B. subtilis of much of its biology. On the one hand, laboratory strains can be transformed with DNA much more efficiently than undomesticated strains. On the other hand, laboratory strains are generally deficient in a variety of behaviors manifest in wild strains. 
http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2008/09/the-view-from-1.html#more 
 
(That's a top-quality microbio blog, by the way.) 
 
I think there is a rationale for not expecting much "constitutional" degradation in lab mice or roundworms. I haven't been involved with any mouse colonies myself, but I would imagine selection still exists. Unless you make sure that almost 100% of every generation breeds almost equally, then fairly substantial selection exists. (Even if you did that, there could be selection against embryos with high mutation burdens, via miscarriage.) Individuals with worse energy efficiency, lower resistance to autoimmunity, etc, should have retarded adolescence and smaller litters. I agree, though, that it seems like traits of near-zero use to cage life should indeed degrade, just as is claimed for Bacillus subtilis. 
 
If the rate of deleterious mutation is that high, then don't we have a Red Queen situation, where strong positive select needs to be applied to each generation just to maintain the status quo? This just doesn't seem reasonable to me. (For one thing, wouldn't we see rapid genetic deterioration in traits not being actively maintained in lab animals)? 
 
I think it's undeniable that there is robust selection against individuals with above-mean mutation burden (this does not alter the species, though, because it is negative/purifying selection). There would seem to be no other way that the species' burden could be at equilibrium. I think what's controversial is the Kondrashov hypothesis that the primary function of sex is to keep the species' burden at a lower equilibrium. 
 
I think I agree with your suggestion that if all men started introducing quite a bit more mutations into the germline, the species should begin to move off of the existing mutational burden equilibrium, toward a worse one. I am not certain though.

I've had a hard time googling a definition for a person's "risk" of diabetes or, say, multiple sclerosis - a notion that is not very intuitive, since you either have MS or you don't.  
 
Is this risk found by adding up all your blood relatives with MS and dividing by the total number of relatives (weighting each relative, of course, by the coefficient of relatedness)? This just seems a little odd - with MS prevalence being about 1%, most people would have no affected relatives and thus a risk of "zero"... which is all the more true for a much rarer disease like myasthenia gravis.

These dudes are talking on Science Friday in 90 minutes. 
http://www.sciencefriday.com/

It'd be cool to do both of the usual political axes and have a 2-d plot. I wanted to put "slightly right, moderately libertarian" - so what I did was I just put libertarian.