Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
The 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…
Continue ReadingSome readers might remember back in 2007, it was widely reported that Chad James Watson has African ancestry: New York Times: DNA Pioneer’s Genome Blurs Race Lines A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European…
Continue ReadingI cover these here mainly because they are not widely known, and relate to ongoing discussions about the generalizability of twin estimates across time and space. To put things into perspective, current debate has papers like this: Rimfeld, K., Krapohl, E., Trzaskowski, M., Coleman, J. R., Selzam, S., Dale, P. S., … & Plomin, R….
Continue ReadingToot toot, here comes the far left fire brigade! Not to worry, your saviors are here to tell you what your eyes see. https://t.co/8AoqW5qLW0 — Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) May 27, 2020 Ewan Birney, “Director of EMBL-EBI with an insatiable love of biology; small research group on genomics research.”. He earlier embarrased himself by…
Continue ReadingLawson, D. J., Davies, N. M., Haworth, S., Ashraf, B., Howe, L., Crawford, A., … & Timpson, N. J. (2020). Is population structure in the genetic biobank era irrelevant, a challenge, or an opportunity?. Human genetics, 139(1), 23-41. Replicable genetic association signals have consistently been found through genome-wide association studies in recent years. The recent…
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