admixture

Mainstreamers keep making progress: educational attainment variation “likely” caused by ancestry variation in Europe

22. April 2020

Lawson, 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…

Population genetics

New paper out: Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability (PNC study)

5. September 2019 0 Comments

Lasker, J., Pesta, B. J., Fuerst, J. G., & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2019). Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability. Psych, 1(1), 431-459. Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomic status (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using…

Genomics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

What you can’t say: genetic group difference edition

6. January 2019 0 Comments

Paul Graham‘s 2004 essay What you can’t say had a big influence on me and remains my favorite essay. In he argued essentially that popular morality shows fashion tendencies i.e. that it varies over time but for no evidence-linked reason. What is at one time considered a grievous moral evil is later considered not a…

Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability, Philosophy

Environmentalists like admixture analysis too (until they don’t)

3. January 2019 0 Comments

See previous post about quotes from the medical genetics and physical anthropology literature on admixture analysis and the causal interpretation. There’s quite a few older admixture studies that examined relationships between racial ancestry and intelligence. Most of these used quite crude methods such as interviewer judgement. Some used a better method, namely objectively measured skin…

Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Admixture analysis and genetic causation: some quotes from the literature

27. December 2018 0 Comments

A common comment on bias in scientific peer review is that reviewers don’t usually say openly they are applying double standards. Instead, they just silently increase their standards. If their bias against some finding is strong, the evidential burden to meet goes to infinity, making sure that nothing is rigorous enough to pass review. A…

Genomics, Metascience

Some more reviews for our PING paper

16. August 2017 0 Comments

How easy is it to get provocative findings using mainstream methods published? Well, it depends on how provocative. Here’s a second round of generally nonsensical reviews for our PING paper (which you can read here and judge yourself: a good chunk of readers of this blog are themselves researchers and don’t need others to review…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genomics

New paper out: Admixture in Argentina (with John Fuerst)

13. June 2017

We have a new big paper out: Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Fuerst, J. (2017). Admixture in Argentina. Mankind Quarterly, 57(4). Retrieved from http://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/57-4/4 Abstract Analyses of the relationships between cognitive ability, socioeconomic outcomes, and European ancestry were carried out at multiple levels in Argentina: individual (max. n = 5,920), district (n = 437), municipal…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, Sociology

Nisbett’s 2009 book on Intelligence: reviews

5. March 2017

Nisbett’s 2009 book on intelligence, Intelligence and how to get it, is a goldmine of stupid claims that one can quote-mine for introduction and discussion sections of papers. For instance, Nisbett tries to argue that brain size is not causal for intelligence! He writes: The correlation between cranial capacity and IQ is probably about .30-.40…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Individual genomic admixture and cognitive ability

10. October 2016

So, I posted this: Abstract We used data from the PING study (n≈1200) to examine the relationship between cognitive ability, socioeconomic outcomes and genomic racial ancestry. We found that when genomic ancestry was not included in models, self-reported race/ethnicity (SIRE) was a useful predictor of cognitive ability/S, but when genomic ancestry was included, SIRE lost…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

The sibling control design

27. May 2015

A friend of mine and his brother just received their 23andme results. In a table they look like this (I have added myself for comparison): Macrorace Bro1 Bro2 Emil European 52.6 53 99.8 MENA 42.5 41.3 0.2 South Asian 2.8 3.4 0 East Asian & Amerindian 1.1 0.7 0 Sub-Saharan African 0.5 0.5 0 Oceanian…

Uncategorized