Academics say the darnest things. Hundreds of years of selective breeding in cows, chickens, pigs, dogs, cats, deer, horses, snakes (yessss), many bird species, many fish species, wheats, tree species etc. And of course human self-domestication. But this one trait is magical!https://twitter.com/drderringer/status/1099321810468986883 …
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Worse than that. If that were remotely true (as it actually is for fertility!), IQ/EDU PGSes wouldn't work out of sample, wouldn't be usable or GWASable across so many cohorts/decades, genetic correlations would be zero, biological enrichments would make no sense, and so on.
Someone needs to do an anonymous poll of geneticists about whether they really think biotech eugenics (embryo selection/genetic engineering) would work. Also ask them if they fear saying it would publicly. Just in general, do surveys of scientists to ask for suppressed beliefs.
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Need to be careful about defining expertise, though. I keep seeing these microbe/plant geneticists denying basic behav gen because they assume that humans must work like their wacky organisms with 60 decaploid chromosomes where everything is 5-way interactions and env-specific.
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Is that because sexual vs asexual reproduction?
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Good point! Sexual reproduction causes the shuffling around (recombination) which breaks the epistasis, but for asexual clonal reproduction, that actually would not happen. Never thought of that, but seems true.
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That's been mentioned in things I'm sure you've read, but it's hardly the only factor. I think a lot of it may be just that they are under enormously more selection and the simple additivity is gone. Hard to imagine stuff like, say, phages' "survival of the flattest" in humans.
End of conversation
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And find geneticists who have used egg donors to have a kid and see if they paid any attention to the donors' intelligence.
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