DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one. I talked to Antonio about this piece a few times. I didn’t have much to say with any insight. These tests aren’t ready for primetime because the prediction is pretty weak/worthless.
With a lot of this stuff realized phenotype is what matters. If I took a test and it said my predicted IQ was 90, or if I took an IQ test and it said that I was in the 15th percentile from the bottom, I wouldn’t reconsider whether I’m dumber than most people seem to think I am. I’d think that the tests were dumb.
Like genetic screening more generally this sort of stuff will become more important for newborns in the future because you don’t have a realized phenotype. Siblings different in intelligence. Some of this is random, but some of it surely dependent on genes. If children have different talents or competencies I suspect many parents will want to know as early as possible (my two oldest are young, but it’s already pretty obvious that my son is much stronger on visuospatial skills while my daughter has a better ability to abstract in a general sense).
Ancient DNA tracks the mainland extinction and island survival of the Tasmanian devil. The main issue I have with all these studies is the importance they put on climate. Climate changes. Often. That’s usually not a sufficient condition for extinction. People and the animals they bring around are.
I guessed that the supplements shirt would not be popular, judging by how many questions I get that would be answered by reading the supplementary text!
That being said, I bought one for myself. Of course, I would! (I’m going to post a photo of me wearing it when I get)
A Financial Times story about the Kalash. I filled in some dumb surveys and it allowed me to read for free. It’s a pretty good story.
When Gmail Launched On April 1, 2004, People Thought It Was A Joke. I’m starting to worry about our reliance on platforms. And that includes Gmail.
How to Talk About ‘Race’ and Genetics. David Reich responds in The New York Times.
There has been a lot of talk on “science Twitter” about the David Reich situation. Some of it in public. And some of it in private DMs. I am heartened personally to see that most people are defending him because he does not deserve the patronizing abuse that’s being directed at him.
I am not much in touch with David, though we have met in person, and exchanged a few emails about his work. It’s not breaking any confidence for me to say that he did not write Who We Are and How We Got Here to become famous. The book will sell well, but it’s not written in a manner that will make him rich. In any case, among his peers, he is already quite famous after all. As he noted in the introduction to Who We Are and How We Got Here he wrote it to speak to those outside of the community of human population geneticists who read and write scientific papers.
Since David has such a high-status people within the community are very careful about what they say about him if they have strong criticisms. Not only is it hard to argue that he’s ignorant of the science (after all, he is one of the major producers of science!), but he’s a powerful figure embedded in a powerful institution.
This is why when you examine the list of 60+ signatories to this op-ed in Buzzfeed, How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics, there are very few working geneticists on the list. I heard a rumor that there were actually a few genetic anthropologists willing to sign, but who didn’t agree with the final text and withdrew. And good for them, because this op-ed is a confused mess.
But, to be frank it’s entirely to be expected from a certain type of scholarship. Like many, I have expressed some concern and annoyance that geneticists engage in imperialism without consulting historians and archaeologists. But these are real disciplines with real facts and theories, whether those facts are undermined, and the theories shown to be false. There is something real to be grasped at. The Buzzfeed op-ed, in contrast, is by turns patronizing, incoherent, or just false.
The conversation has been bracing, but I’m not sure it’s moving toward any synthesis.
Complex traits are probably subject to Kurzweil’s The Law of Accelerating Returns. Stuff is moves slow, then faster, and then we’re slammed against a new world before we can adjust.
Here’s a poll I created:
“I’m a geneticist and in relation to the Reich op-ed I think…”
— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) April 2, 2018
Detecting signatures of positive selection along defined branches of a population tree using LSD. The day will come when ancient DNA papers will start to slow down in their rate of release and I’ll have to catch up on the selection literature (though to be fair, there’s only so many real targets of selection we’ll pick up).
Comparison of Genotypic and Phenotypic Correlations: Cheverud’s Conjecture in Humans.
Back to reading Enlightenment Now.
Excited that the AAPA meeting is happening in a few weeks in Austin. Will be meeting up with a few people.
Any genetic IQ test should predict a higher number than realised, because what we can test is the maximal potential. IQ can be easily compared with height: You have a genetic potential up to lets say 185 cm, but whether you fully realise it, is dependent on environmental factors and usually you will have no single individual realising its full potential for IQ development.
So in theory, most people having an IQ of 90 in the USA should have a potential higher genetic IQ, but the relative difference should be always there to the more intelligent people.
The genetic IQ would be the limiting factor: No one can be above his own limits without methods of brain and genetic manipulation we still don’t have. You will always be below it.
This also means that a child with a potential IQ range up to 90 will be never able to reach an average IQ for European standards. Yet someone with an potential IQ of 150 could be ruined by a disease, accident or generally very bad circumstances.
obs, your comment is kind of bullshit. you have a training set, and you have a population you want to predict. hopefully they’ll both have the same range of env.
The genetic IQ will be a huge problem because you know from a wide range of diseases that small environmental factors influencing one individual drastically won’t do too much to another one. And looking at the US population the range of the environment is so huge, you will always be speculative unless you make such detailed profiles of segments of the population with family and health history and stuff.
Fact is you can only predict the upper limit of a genetic IQ, the upper range. Because down you can go all the way to the bottom for a lot of reasons. You will always be below your genetic potential, but never above it. The real question is how much of your potential you realised. Is it 70 or 90 percent. Would you have been able to reach 130 even though you are just 110?
Talking about unborn children, you can only predict their limitations, not where they will land in reality phenotype wise. In a very coarse manner statistically you can, but that’s not the same as an exact prediction for an individual.
The genetic potential of an individual is what matters. If you want to know the real IQ of a person: Do the test and that’s it. But the genetic IQ range is something different.
Even the genetic IQ range won’t be correct if they don’t go for the details of environmental influences.
If you want to know the real IQ of a person: Do the test and that’s it
No. An honest IQ test will give you a number and a range. E.g., “110, with a 95% chance that your real IQ is between 105 and 115”.
“Any genetic IQ test should predict a higher number than realised, because what we can test is the maximal potential.”
In theory, perhaps; in practice, we probably will never know the maximum IQ associated with some specific combination of genes – we only will have what we can empirically measure: the real IQ of real people with these genes; then, any prediction about “that person have this genes, than he will have this IQ” will have already incorporated the average random events reducing real IQ.
Could be possible to recover the comments in the older posts (like in the Unz iteration of the blog, where the older comments were imported with the posts)?
Because in many of your posts, there is also interesting things in the threads of comments, not only in the original posts.
Hey, do you plan to comment on the Iberomaurusian paper? The raw data is also out if you’re interested. 🙂
yeah. i need to read the supplements.
Could be possible to recover the comments in the older posts (like in the Unz iteration of the blog, where the older comments were imported with the posts)?
i have them. i can import but it will take time. i’ll prioritize that.
@Miguel: Completely agree, but that will produce a lot of incorrect individual results still. Even with the best method thinkable.
Razib wrote in his Twitter feed: “i should say proto-sanskrit. sanskrit as we understand is to my knowledge developed in south asia as a synthesis of the indo-aryan language with native substrate”
I assume that most of the “native substrate” is vocabulary, especially for things like animals, plants, and geographical features. That vocabulary would have had no cognates in the vocabulary of steppe pastorialists.
Grammar is usually more conservative. I would assume that the differences would be highlighted by comparison of old Sanskrit texts with Avestan and Old Persian texts, because the Iranian people settled very different territory than the Ancestral Indians.
From your twitter feed: “2) “hinduism”!=vedic religion. former is brought by migrants from outside. latter is synthesized in situ in south asia”
Don’t you mean the reverse? Hinduism is what I would call the current in situ synthesis. Vedic religion is what I would call the historic religion brought by the Indo-Aryans to South Asia in its early period of evolution and synthesis which eventually evolved into Hinduism over time and with other local influences.
“also, i should say proto-sanskrit. sanskrit as we understand is to my”
I think “pre-sanskrit” would be more apt. A proto-language is usually the direct common source (the most recent common ancestor language) from which daughter languages evolve, and there was probably synthesis of substrate with Indo-Aryan language to form that. A language that is ancestral to a proto-language is usually called a “pre-[protolanguage name]” language.
@Walter Sobchak
The substrate in Sanskrit is widely assumed to have been the language of the Harappans (i.e. of the mature IVC culture). I recently summarized some of the features of that substrate here: http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-harappan-language.html
You can go to the link for my analysis and justifications but the main points were as follows:
1. Retroflex phonemes where part of this language.
2. Substrate vocabulary topics are mostly what you would expect.
The case that there was a separate Harappan language that was a substrate to Indo-Aryan languages is supported by the number and nature of the likely substrate words in early Sanskrit.
The lion’s share of Vedic substrate words are not Dravidian and instead cannot be attributed to any well attested linguistic source, hence they are probably Harappan.
Kuiper identified 383 specifically Rigvedic words as non-Indo-Aryan — roughly 4% of its vocabulary. Oberlies prefers to consider 344–358 “secure” non-Indo-European words in the Rigveda. Even if all local non-Indo-Aryan names of persons and places are subtracted from Kuiper’s list, that still leaves some 211–250 “foreign” words, around 2% of the total vocabulary of the Rigveda.
These loanwords cover local flora and fauna, agriculture and artisanship, terms of toilette, clothing and household. Dancing and music are particularly prominent, and there are some items of religion and beliefs. They only reflect village life, and not the intricate civilization of the Indus cities, befitting a post-Harappan time frame. In particular, Indo-Aryan words for plants stem in large part from other language families, especially from the now-lost substrate languages.
3. Harappan had a distinctive animate prefix k-
4. Harappan is not a Dravidian language.
5. Harappan is not a Munda language.
6. Harappan was not an Indo-European language.
7. Harappan seals probably weren’t a full written language.
Seals were also probably written right to left.
8. The evidence for an expected Mesopotamian language family connection is weak, but it may have been ergative.
9. Pre-Indo-European Harappan culture contributed significantly to the resulting Indo-Aryan culture.
10. There was probably a single Harappan language, at least for Harappa proper.
Reich is naive (or just talking defensively) if he thinks his research will make racial bias any less sensible to the average person. The news is too filled with examples almost every day with stories that people will use to fortify their stereotypes about different groups.
I’m reading a paper on the evolution of oak trees by Andrew L. Hipp et al. Genomics is also revising some conventional wisdom in this field, i.e. oaks originated from a high latitude ancestor rather than in the tropics. Of course, as a layman, I get very bogged down in the details (forget the supplements) and just want the nitty-gritty. Could you spread your pop-sci mojo this way every now and then. Thx
Honest question in an effort to be polite.
Is the term “Desi” pejorative or rude when used by a non-South Asian, or in some other contexts of which a writer should beware?
What is preferred terminology, if that is the case, that isn’t too pedantic?
Am I correct that “Desi” has the same meaning as “Untouchable”, “Dalit” and “Non-Scheduled Caste”?