Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Jared asked me if I wanted to summarize recent work in the field, based on a new review article by Ian Deary, Simon R. Cox & W. David Hill. Well, I did: American Renaissance: Genes, Brains, and Intelligence: What’s New?
Continue ReadingPrior posts touching on Gregory Clark: What does money buy? Selected readings from lottery studies, Thinking about intergenerational stability of socioeconomic status Updated 2020-02-23: Actually, cancellation comes for Gregory Clark too, Steve Sailer has the story write-up: Economic Historian Gregory Clark’s Lecture on “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” Is Postponed for Crimethink Most people…
Continue ReadingA friend asked me to give him some pointers to the recent evidence on dysgenics, or the selection against valued traits. Challenge was accepted. This is not an exhaustive review. It’s a summary of stuff I found interesting. If you want a longer and more pessimistic review, read the recent book by Sarraf et al…
Continue ReadingI have written on the children produced by mixed-race couples before, and since it went so well, it’s time to try again. Only this time, another angle: the parents themselves. Someone reminded me of research showing that mixed-race marriages are less stable. So I had a look at the literature, tweeting my findings while skimming…
Continue ReadingThe within-person (or intra-individual or within‐individual or …), design is a longitudinal design where we follow people over time as they change on some purported cause, and look at whether the purported effect also varies accordingly. This simple design is surprisingly underused despite having the strong advantage that it controls by design for both genetic…
Continue ReadingPolygenic scores are all the rage. Naturally, you want to know your own scores, and you have a reading of your genome from some company. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t provide you with interesting results? Fear not, you can download your ‘raw data’ (actually the genotypes from the SNP chip) and upload it to some other…
Continue ReadingAnimal breeding, human breeding (2015) Recent reviews in animal breeding (2019) Breeder genomics is way ahead of human genomics. Whenever something can be and is done in animals, it takes years for human geneticists to realize the same thing. Recently, media fuss has been all about using CRISPR, and there was that human baby born…
Continue ReadingPutting these in writing in a single place for ease of reference. Unfortunately, no one wrote down all these predictions some years ago to show they really were predictions, but one could probably find textual evidence for many of these in various papers and blogposts. Some of them have been supported already, and some are…
Continue ReadingThere are many studies that look at signs for selection using large genomic datasets. This post provides a selective summary of such studies from 2018 to now, so very recent progress. There are in general two ways to approach the question of selection. First, one can look at known variants for traits found via GWASs,…
Continue ReadingSee prior post on self vs. other measurements of personality for a similar take. Height is the favorite trait in ‘behavioral’ genetics: it’s easy, fast and cheap to measure, continuous as opposed to dichotomous or discrete, highly polygenic, highly heritable, and no one complains to the PC police about it. So we have tons of…
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