This Doctor Does What to 6-Year-Old Girls’ Clitorises? This reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story of a pediatrician being attacked in England because a really stupid outraged person was opposed to pedophilia. Here’s a sentence for the ages: ” Because much as Savage might like it to be, the world is not yet a place where most little girls can have a clitoris that looks like a penis and feel entirely at ease.” I think the intersex have been subject to such misrepresentation historically that advocates for this group should really focus on being true to the facts and not appealing to emotions.

Caring About Strangers. I recall years ago that the Christian Rock group Jars of Clay collaborated on a concert with liberal Hollywood-based organizations to raise consciousness about religious intolerance and persecution in China. Jars of Clay naturally was focused on the Protestant “House Churches,” while Hollywood was focused on Tibetan Buddhists. Both instances of persecution were, and are, real, but which one you focus on is obviously determined by your own world-view and sympathies.

Consumer Genetics Needs More Transparency, Not Excessive Regulation. In general I agree. I suppose my null or default position is not to regulate this sort of thing. Those who wish to regulate need to make their case, as opposed to fear-mongering.

Gore Was Accused of Sexual Advances. Excelsior!

Are High Glycemic Index Carbs Worse Than Saturated Fat? “…swapping saturated fat for carbs with a high glycemic index (e.g. 5% lower calories from saturated fat, and 5% increased calories from high GI carbs) was associated with a 33% increased heart attack risk.”

One of the peculiarities of the synthesis of 19th and early 20th historical linguistics and biological anthropology was the perception by many British thinkers that the English, as the scions of the Anglo-Saxons, were fundamentally a different race from the Celtic nations to their west, the Welsh and Irish, and the Scots to the north (yes, I know the Scottish nation emerged is a mix of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon elements which were preponderant at different times and periods). In other words English nationalists would characterize their own race as a branch of the German peoples. English was a Germanic language, and the linguistic chasm emphasized more starkly a distinction from the Celts who inhabited Britain prior to the arrival of the Germans, and gave the island its name before they were marginalized and pushed to the “Celtic fringe.”

The historical context of this does not need to be elaborated in detail. The Emerald Isle’s integration into the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland was always a difficult affair. This was due in large part to religion (the lack of an effective Irish Reformation may have had other structural causes); the Irish were a Roman Catholic populace at a time when Roman Catholicism and loyalty to the monarchy were presumed to be contradictory. In 1800, before the potato famine and the English demographic explosion, Ireland accounted for one third of the population of the United Kingdom (I do not put much stock in the linguistic difference, as the Welsh speaking regions were firmly Protestant and so not perceived to be sources of equivalent dissension despite their cultural marginality). With the rise of taxonomic science what was a crisp social chasm was reconceptualized as a biological and evolutionary gap along the Great Chain of Being.

In the twentieth century the tide turned, today most scholars would assert that the shift from Celtic to Anglo-Saxon speech and culture in what became England was a matter of emulation, not genetic replacement. Personally I suspect that the pendulum has swung too far, but it does show how strongly influenced by fashion these sorts of preconceptions are.

Modern genetics can clear up the confusion to some extent. A new paper in The European Journal of Human Genetics surveys samples from Dublin, the south & southeast of England (the heart of Saxon Britain), Aberdeen, Portugal, Bulgaria and Sweden. Population structure and genome-wide patterns of variation in Ireland and Britain. I’ll just focus on the figures of interest in relation to the questions I aired above.

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By now you’ve probably stumbled onto Wired‘s profile of Sergey Brin, and his quest to understand and overcome Parkinson’s disease through the illumination available via genomic techniques. I want to spotlight this section:

Not everyone with Parkinson’s has an LRRK2 mutation; nor will everyone with the mutation get the disease. But it does increase the chance that Parkinson’s will emerge sometime in the carrier’s life to between 30 and 75 percent. (By comparison, the risk for an average American is about 1 percent.) Brin himself splits the difference and figures his DNA gives him about 50-50 odds.

…

Brin, of course, is no ordinary 36-year-old. As half of the duo that founded Google, he’s worth about $15 billion. That bounty provides additional leverage: Since learning that he carries a LRRK2 mutation, Brin has contributed some $50 million to Parkinson’s research, enough, he figures, to “really move the needle.” In light of the uptick in research into drug treatments and possible cures, Brin adjusts his overall risk again, down to “somewhere under 10 percent.” That’s still 10 times the average, but it goes a long way to counterbalancing his genetic predisposition.

Do you think Brin’s chances are really 10 percent? Is he being an objective analytical machine, or is he exhibiting the ticks of systematic bias which plague wetware? This is interesting because when it comes to big-picture extrapolations individuals who come out of the mathematical disciplines (math, computer science, physics, economics, etc.) have a much better ability to construct models and project than those who come out of biology. Biology is dominated by masters of detail. The system-builders only have small niches across the sub-domains, with the exception of evolutionary biology where the system is the raison d’etre of the field. But though biologists lack strategic vision, they are often masters of tactics when on familiar ground. I would like to believe Sergey Brin’s estimate of the probability in his case, but I do wonder if biomedical scientists working on Parkinson’s are aware of powerful constraints and substantial obstacles which would force one to be less optimistic. I would of course assume that Brin though is aware of constraints, or lack thereof, because he has talked to the relevant researchers. On the other hand, would a biomedical scientist be totally candid with Sergey Brin due to even the silver of a possibility of a research grant of magnificent scope?

GDP PPP inhabitant by European region. Combining Italy or the UK into one GDP number is deceptive. Lombardy has twice the GDP PPP of much of southern Italy. The regional differences are not nearly as stark in Spain, where poor regions like Andalusia and Galicia exhibit less of a gap from prosperous regions. By the way, does anyone know if there’s the ability in R to map these differences easily? I’ve only done USA mapping.

Separation Between Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens Might Have Occurred 500,000 Years Earlier, DNA from Teeth Suggests. Not sure if this makes any difference evolutionary genetic wise, though these sorts of issues are relevant for paleoanthropologists trying to reconstruct paleoecologies of hominins.

Mystery of the pregnant pope: New film reopens one of the Vatican’s most enduring wounds. I saw this film on a Lufthansa flight a few months back. I liked it. Though the article doesn’t make it clear enough that it’s 99.9% likely to be based on a legend concocted for purposes of propaganda.

New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought. As Joe Biden would say, this is a big f**king deal.

Anthrogenetics. A reader pointed me to this interesting weblog/review page. Feel free to point to other interesting science weblogs in the comments.

Sexual urges overcome cultural taboo. So it turns out that the female children of immigrants from conservative societies (South Asian and Islamic) are paying for hymen restoration surgeries. The more interesting question would be if these children become sexually conservative themselves, perpetuating the life history trajectory so that their own children have to go through these sorts of reconstructions.

Vitamin D Deficiency Due To Genetic Variants. Vitamin D supplementation is all the rage right now. What if its efficacy and necessity is conditional on genetic background?

Is the “missing heritability” right under our noses? The issue may have to do with the exigencies of research programs, not a deep scientific mystery.

A Singular Kind of Eugenics. It seems “privilege” is the new hot-button for Lefties who are skeptical of assisted reproductive technologies and genetic modifications. I suspect it’s a Left-wing buzzword which is equivalent to Righties who bring up “dignity” or the “wisdom of repugnance.” Much easier than having to generate clear prose and understand the complex motives which underpin an issue. Buying really expensive smartphones and pure entertainment machines like iPads also are manifestations of privilege. So what distinguishes X from Y? Not the commonality, privilege, but perhaps the same gut intuitions which Right bioconservatives are willing to man up to, repugnance. Some privileges are repugnant (biological interventions) and some frivolous (iPad). Also, when did discourse replace discussion and privilege replace class?

Saltie Makes a Sandwich Almost Entirely Out of Lettuce. There is nothing magical about meat; it’s all about the flavor.

After my post yesterday on Bryan Caplan’s argument for having more children, I was curious as to what the public perceptions of the ideal number of children was in the General Social Survey. There’s a variable with large N’s which is already in there: CHLDIDEL. It asks:

What do you think is the ideal number of children for a
family to have?

Curiously I noticed a bounce back in terms of ideal numbers in the 2000s plotting CHLDIDEL by year, YEAR. This could be just due to demographic changes (a larger proportion of pro-natalist immigrants after 1965), so I sliced the sample in a few different ways. More specifically, I focused on women aged 18-40, since these are presumably the ones who are the ultimate agents in terms of family size, and combined years by decade to increase sample size for the demographic slices.

It does seem that there was a broad societal shift among women of child-bearing age to prefer larger families in the 2000s in relation to the previous decade. Below the fold I have some charts with the means (the small dots) by decade as well as the 95% confidence interval for various demographics.

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One of the major criticisms leveled against genome-wide association studies for complex diseases is that they have identified loci which account for a relatively small proportion of the variance in most traits. The difference between this small proportion of variance explained by known loci and the (generally large) total amount of variance known to be due to genetic factors has been called the “missing heritability”. Much ink has been spilled speculating about where this missing heritability lies.

Two papers published this week suggest that maybe much of the heritability isn’t actually missing at all. The argument is simple: when performing a genome-wide association study, people use very stringent thresholds for calling a SNP associated with a trait. This is reasonable; people generally want to follow up only on true positives. However, there are probably many loci which don’t reach these highly stringent cutoffs but which truly influence the trait in question. Using methods to determine how much of the variance can be explained by these loci of smaller effect, one group suggests that about half of the heritability of height can be explained by common SNPs, and possibly close to all of it if other factors are taken into account. The authors have, in their discussion, one of the most reasonable, non-hyperbolic discussions of where the “missing heritability” lies, and how whole-genome sequencing will affect genome-wide association studies. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s their conclusion::

If other complex traits in humans, including common diseases, have genetic architecture similar to that of height, then our results imply that larger GWASs will be needed to find individual SNPs that are significantly associated with these traits, because the variance typically explained by each SNP is so small. Even then, some of the genetic variance of a trait will be undetected because the genotyped SNPs are not in perfect LD with the causal variants. Deep resequencing studies are likely to uncover more polymorphisms, including causal variants that will be represented on future genotyping arrays. Our data provide strong evidence that the variation contributed by many of these causal variants is likely to be small and that very large sample sizes will be required to show that their individual effects are statistically significant. A similar conclusion was drawn recently for schizophrenia. In some cases the small variance will be due to a large effect for a rare allele, but this will still require a large sample size to reach significance. Genome-wide approaches like those used in our study can advance understanding of the nature of complex-trait variation and can be exploited for selection programs in agriculture and individual risk prediction in humans.

—
Citations:

Park et al. (2010) Estimation of effect size distribution from genome-wide association studies and implications for future discoveries. Nature Genetics. doi:10.1038/ng.610.

Yang et al. (2010) Common SNPs explain a large proportion of the heritability for human height. Nature Genetics. doi:10.1038/ng.608.

The 9th ResearchBlogCast is up. We talk about the recent paper on cystic fibrosis genetics which I blogged.

I won the 3 Quarks Daily Science Prize. ‘Top quark’. Heh. “I” = Ed Yong. ‘nuf said.

Brown-eyed men perceived to be more dominant. Dienekes offers up a more banal explanation, that the disjunction between blue vs. brown-eyed males in dominance perception has to do with a correlation that’s a holdover from past population differences which are being eliminated through admixture. Plausible enough to me, excepting that I do wonder at models which presume that continental populations were ever so isolated.

Chimpanzees murder for land. In biology Malthus was right. Intrapspecific competition is the norm quite often because of reproduction up to the carrying capacity. This is why I think Brian Ferguson’s idea that war is a product of agriculture is highly naive; hunter-gatherers were up at their carrying capacity as well.

Bernie Madoff, Free at Last. Celebrity sociopath.

If it’s OK to reject blood from gay men, what about blacks? Will Saletan takes things to their logical conclusion to undermine the premise.

Over at The Wall Street Journal Bryan Caplan has an op-ed, The Breeders’ Cup: Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children. Much of the op-ed focuses on behavior genetic insight as to the relative lack of long term importance of shared environment (read: parental environmental input). But the section on happiness and diminishing returns on the misery cost of children piqued my interest:

…closer look at the General Social Survey also reveals that child No. 1 does almost all the damage. Otherwise identical people with one child instead of none are 5.6 percentage points less likely to be very happy. Beyond that, additional children are almost a happiness free lunch. Each child after the first reduces your probability of being very happy by a mere .6 percentage points.

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