Sasha Gusev won’t answer basic questions about his beliefs
Sasha Gusev is a statistical geneticist who spends a lot of time on Twitter. He has been attacking various behavioral genetics studies lately, thus earning some ire from people in…
Polygenic score validity and group differences
Probably the most common objection to studies of polygenic scores for education/intelligence for race differences is that the polygenic scores are less valid for non-European populations. For instance, here's a…
Variance explained is mostly bad
Reporting the proportion of variance explained by some statistical model is ubiquitous. However, just like p-values, it is a misleading metric. I'll try explain why it is used, and why…
The genetics of mental illness
In popular discourse and the media, the debate is between those who recognize significant genetic causation in mental illnesses versus the status quo blank slate people who leave all such…
What have we learned from the 2022 education GWAS?
Okbay, A., Wu, Y., Wang, N., Jayashankar, H., Bennett, M., Nehzati, S. M., ... & Young, A. I. (2022). Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from genome-wide…
The Bird paper, and hereditarian predictions
I keep getting asked about this, so I figure a short note is in order. Some months ago, Commie Kevin (Twitter) AKA. Kevin Bird published an anti-hereditarian study: Bird, K.…
State of genetic predictions: an example
While we don't take anecdotes too seriously on this blog, here I will present a small one. If you are one of those who have purchased genetic test results from…
Predicting IQ from genetics: how far have we come? [January 2020]
Counting significant hits was always a dumb way to measure progress in genomic prediction of a trait. Breeders using animals and plants never bothered with this approach and they used…
SQL server for population frequencies from 1000 genomes
Note: 2018 June 26 Server down right now, investigating. Note: August 16, 2017 server IP changed to 67.207.92.10. Original post We need dplyr for this: library(dplyr) First, use the anon…
Admixture mapping assisted GWAS
Medical researchers have noticed that some diseases differ by SIRE (self-identified race/ethnicity) groups which differ by genomic (racial) ancestry. Hence, when genomic measures became available (last 15 years or so),…