Your cry is heard!

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece out by Nathaniel Comfort, The Eugenic Impulse. I would just like to offer that to a great extent we already live in the second age of eugenics. The high frequency of abortions of fetuses which come back positive for Down syndrome is well known. But it seems possible that we’ll be able to reduce the frequency of many Mendelian diseases as well. Basically those ailments which are due to a major mutation of large effect and high penetrance (i.e., you have the mutation, you have the disease).

A major goal which we’re very far from though is the ability to select for quantitative traits. There are technical hurdles, both tactical and strategic, here. The major issue is that there are simply too many variants for one to be able to select a ‘perfect’ genetic profile. Those who’ve talked to me know my response in this domain: select for low mutational load. High coverage fetal whole genome sequencing would do that. The marketing pitch for this writes itself: imagine you, but bright of mind, and beautiful of face!

While I was at Spencer Wells’ poster at ASHG I was primarily curious about bar plots. He’s got really good spatial coverage, so I’m moderately excited about the paper (though I didn’t see much explicit testing of phylogenetic hypotheses, which I think this sort of paper has to do now; we’re beyond PCA and bar plots only papers). That being said, Spencer was more interested in me promoting the Scientific Grants Program. Here’s some more information:

The Genographic Project’s Scientific Grants Program awards grants on a rolling basis for projects that focus on studying the history of the human species utilizing innovative anthropological genetic tools. The variety of projects supported by the scientific grants will aim to construct our ancient migratory and demographic history while developing a better understanding of the phylogeographic structure of world populations. Sample research topics could include subjects like the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages, genetic insights into Papua New Guinea’s high linguistic diversity, the number and routes of migrations out of Africa, the origin of the Inca, or the genetic impact of the spread of maize agriculture in the Americas.

Recipients will typically be population geneticists, students, linguists, and other researchers or scientists interested in pursuing questions relevant to the Genographic Project’s broad goal of exploring our migratory history. Recipients of Genographic scientific grant funds will become members of the Genographic Consortium, and will be expected to act as agents of the greater Genographic mission, participating in and reporting on multiple aspects of Genographic fieldwork, in addition to their own proposed and mission‐aligned pilot projects. Openness and transparency within the Consortium are the key values of the project’s research team, and grantees will be expected to abide by this code of conduct.

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I was at ASHG this week, so I’ve followed reactions to the election passively. But one thing I’ve seen is repeated commentary on the fact that Asian Americans have swung toward the Democrats over the past generation. The thing that pisses me off is that there is a very obvious low-hanging fruit sort of explanation out there, and I’m frankly sick and tired of reading people ramble on without any awareness of this reality. We spent the past few months talking about the power of polls, and quant data vs. qual (bullshit) analysis, with some of my readers going into full on let’s-see-if-Razib-is-moron-enough-to-swallow-this-crap mode.

In short, it’s religion. Barry Kosmin has documented that between 1990 and 2010 Asian Americans have become far less Christian, on average. Meanwhile, the Republican party has become far more Christian in terms of its identity. Do you really require more than two sentences to infer from this what the outcome will be in terms of how Asian Americans will vote?

Below I took the data from Pew’s Religious Identification Survey in terms of how all Americans lean politically based on religion, and compared it to how Asian Americans lean based on religion.

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As most readers know I was at ASHG 2012. I’m going to divide this post in half. First, the generalities of the meeting. And second, specific posters, etc.

Generalities:

– Life Technologies/Ion Torrent apparently hires d-bag bros to represent them at conferences. The poster people were fine, but the guys manning the Ion Torrent Bus were total jackasses if they thought it would be funny/amusing/etc. Human resources acumen is not always a reflection of technological chops, but I sure don’t expect organizational competence if they (HR) thought it was smart to hire guys who thought (the d-bags) it would be amusing to alienate a selection of conference goers at ASHG. Go Affy & Illumina!

– Speaking of sequencing, there were some young companies trying to pitch technologies which will solve the problem of lack of long reads. I’m hopeful, but after the Pacific Biosciences fiasco of the late 2000s, I don’t think there’s a point in putting hopes on any given firm.

– I walked the poster hall, read the titles, and at least skimmed all 3,000+ posters’ abstracts. No surprise that genomics was all over the place. But perhaps a moderate surprise was how big exomes are getting for medically oriented people.

– Speaking of medical/clinical people, I noticed that in their presentations they used the word ‘Caucasian‘ a lot. This was not evident in the pop-gen folks. It shows the influence of bureaucratic nomenclature in modern medicine, as they have taken to using somewhat nonsensical US Census Bureau categories.

– Twitter was a pretty big deal. There were so many interesting sessions that I found myself checking my feed constantly for the #ASHG2012 hashtag. It was also an easy way to figure out who else was at the same session (e.g., in my case, very often Luke Jostins).

– If you could track the patterns of movements of smartphones at the conference it would be interesting to see a network of clustering of individuals. For example, the evolutionary and population genomics posters were bounded by more straight-up informatics (e.g., software to clean your raw sequence data), from which there was bleed over. But right next to the evolution and population genomics sections (and I say genomics rather than genetics, because the latter has been totally subsumed by the former) you had some type of pediatric disease genetics aisles. I wasn’t the only one to have a freak out when I mistakenly kept on moving (i.e., you go from abstruse discussions of the population structure of Ethiopia, to concrete ones about the likely probability of death of a newborn with an autosomal dominant disorder, with photos of said newborn!).

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I’m at ASHG 2012, so tell me what’s going on in the world.

One day my daughter will lament my antiquated taste in music. “Dad, how can you listen to that stuff?” Hey, we kept it real. Dial-up modems, no holo-touchscreens.

A week ago I posted on a rather scary case of medical doctors withholding information from a family because they felt that it was in the best interests of the family. I objected mostly because I don’t have a good feeling about this sort of paternalism. Laura Hercher has a follow up. She’s not offering just her opinion, but she actually made some calls to people who were involved in the case. From what I can gather in her post the issue that triggered this outrage (in my opinion, it’s an outrage) is that for these particular tests informed consent was simply not mandatory. Since they didn’t have the consent a priori, the doctors had to go with their judgement.

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I am currently reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. The review will go live concurrently with Jim Manzi’s Uncontrolled, which I finished weeks ago. The two works are qualitatively different, but fundamentally they’re both concerned with epistemology. I do have to admit that halfway through  The Signal and the Noise I long for Manzi’s density and economy of prose. As someone on the margins of the LessWrong community I’m already familiar with many of the arguments that Silver forwards, so perhaps this evaluation is not fair.

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Scott Jackisch (a.k.a., “Oakland Futurist Guy”) has a post up with the title, Jersey Shore is better than cat burning. Provocative? Yes. Timely? No. Jersey Shore is so 2010. We live in the age of Honey Boo Boo. This is clear from Google Trends. The red line represents searches for Honey Boo Boo, and the blue for Jersey Shore.

Mama June farting up a storm is still superior to cat burning. But about the Sistine Chapel, I’ll leave you with Mr. Jackisch’s ruminations on that and genital mutilation:

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