That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to be found at observably different frequencies between populations than the ones used to create an ancestry report. Presumably because racists would ignore all the mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
> That alleles linked to cognition and behaviour are no less likely (unless fatal or impacting reproduction) to be found at observably different frequencies between populations than the ones used to create an ancestry report.
I though ancestry reports were regarded as unreliable to the point of meaninglessness because the genes used were not sufficiently strong indicators of population?
> Presumably because racists would ignore all the mediating environmental factors or vastly misrepresent the proportion of variance explained by a given genotype.
Not discussing something because people can misrepresent it is a bad idea. it is both wrong, and has the opposite effect to that intended because it lends credibility to claims of cover up.
I would posit that whoever is saying they’re unreliable has an agenda. Are they 100% accurate in the sense of being able to determine whether you’re 6.2 vs 6.3% Italian? No, there’s always a small degree of uncertainty as more genomes are sequenced and reference panels are updated, but at this point unless you’re from an isolated tribe in the Amazon or some incredibly niche case they’re very representative.
Most people don’t necessarily understand recombination and that if three of your grandparents are Danish and one of your grandparents is, Italian, then you are going to be on average 25% Italian… but that it’s also a distribution centred around 25%. By luck of the draw you could be 3% or you could be 45% Italian genome-wise. People might base their identity on being 1/4 this or 1/8 that, and be upset when an ancestry report gives the actual %.
You can see this by looking at genes with observable consequences such as lactose tolerance. While there are multiple genes for this AFAIK, the commonest is spread over a huge area.
Something as specific as "Danish" or "Italian" genes looks illusory.
Looking for intelligence differences between people of different skin color makes as much sense as looking for intelligence differences between tall and short people. You seem to believe in distinct "races" as a genetic concept, whereas all I see in the data is correlations with place-of-collection. The more people you sample from, the more any clustering will literally start looking like a physical map of the world.
So, what would you say about looking for intelligence differences between people of different ancestry?
We know quite well that some traits are concentrated in a single place or two: marathon winners come disproportionately from the Rift Valley in Kenya, sickle cell disease is mostly a West African trait and Tay-Sachs disease is concentrated among the Ashkenazim.
Few people dispute the above. The really controversial question is whether there are any such differences from the neck up, so to say.
If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation. In other words, the differences within each population would be much greater than between the populations. Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal. So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?
> two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means
It depends if we talk about means or tail ends. The GP post referred to marathon runners, presumably winning marathon runners, even within the Rift Valley in Kenya don't get selected from the mean of the population but from the tail-end. So, while there isn't much of a difference for means between runners in Albania and Kenya, when we look at tail end we might find very large differences.
Same thing for any case where is a selection process. If you have any "top-X" selection involved, then looking at means is a bit more confusing.
> Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal
Hmm, I don't see here people anyone arguing not treating people as individuals. Of course we have to treat people as individuals. But not sure how that contradicts looking a distribution of traits, features, disease markers, etc.
If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal? If we could identify some genetic marker that increased the probability by a few percentage points of identifying intellectual marathon runners would that justify discriminating to favor them at the expense of others? Many dystopian scifi stories start from a similar premise.
> If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal?
Maybe you're arguing for or against some point the GP poster made. I was mainly saying relying on means in the particular example doesn't seem to work. I was helping you out! If you wanted to refute GP's point you could have said, "here marathon runners statistics doesn't quite apply".
Yeah I know "the means are closer to each other than the standard deviation" is the "standard" (pun intended) thing that high school and college kids get about difference between men vs women and other population characteristics and you're trying to make a very good point, but it just doesn't always apply and sometimes repeating it when it doesn't apply, instead of convincing people, could end up confusing them.
"If any such differences exist it would be, at a population level, two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means, well within a standard deviation."
Overlapping normal distribution, yes, but slightly different means, well within a standard deviation seems to be overconfident.
"Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal."
No contest here.
"So then why is there so much interest among skeptical, contrarian, anti-woke, scientific racism types on this question?"
Because the difference at the extremes would be significant, and would explain overrepresentation and underrepresentation of certain groups among, say, top scientists.
The competing hypothesis, which explains differences among groups by discrimination and/or poverty, doesn't fully explain why heavily persecuted groups such as Jewish or Vietnamese refugees still manage an academic rebound within a generation or so of arriving into safety, even though they are still targeted by racial hatred. Taken globally or even just in the US, the correlation between academic success and persecution/power status is weak enough that it makes people doubt the "discrimination/poverty" explanation and motivates them to seek alternatives.
I’ve said nothing of the sort. I’m also well aware of the concept of admixture and that dimensionality reduction methods like PCA and MDS with enough samples mirror geography. I also know that the variants contributing the most to the X and Y axes of such analyses are the ones with a high FST, because unsurprisingly prior to a few hundred years ago people didn’t move around that much and were subject to different genetic bottlenecks and selection pressures. And most alleles are rare, so when one is fixed between populations it’s generally informative from an ancestry standpoint even if non-coding.
Your reflexive dismissal of something that’s not only factual but wouldn’t be controversial about any vertebrate except humans is exactly what I was alluding to.
