I remember Stephen Jay Gould lamenting the drain and frustration that cleaning up the mess of this pseudoscientific racism can be, this "zombie science." Our time is limited and precious: thank you for spending some portion of it fighting back this wicked nonsense.
"Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. . . 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.'"
my take on attempting to correlate intelligence with genomic factors: concentrate on identifying the top performing outliers- the leading tail. The .001. Obviously precocious achievers, like children who can read before age 3. The extraordinary performers. Do genomic profiles. Attempt to establish similarities in polygenic clusters, using as much detail as available. Such a study might at least establish some data touchpoints for expanding the investigation. But the focus of investigation should be in establishing strong genetic similarity among the most "gifted" individuals, not in studies of large population cohorts attempting to determine a median and a bell curve.
I admit to being so out of my depth in this research discipline that I don't know if any of that sort of study has already been done, or is in the process of being done. But searching for correlation associations between genes, polygenic clusters, and the "utility relationships" of such traits with specific advantages in mental processing, or a more general level of intellectual skill acuity, in order to identify the critical genotypic factors that might exist would seem to me to be the place to start.
There might be more than one sort of advantageous circuit design in that regard, of course. So to speak.
Studies attempting to correlate "skin lightness"* and "brain size"? That's just sad.
https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121.pdf Results are non-zero, but on the other hand not especially compelling. I agree that every intuition suggests that there ought to be something identifiable about those highly precocious individuals. It is remarkable that the genetic signal is so weak.
quite remarkable that a definitive result is so elusive, perhaps not even reliably accessible via genotypic identification. That this crown of creation unique to our species remains such a mystery.
Great job, Eric.
I remember Stephen Jay Gould lamenting the drain and frustration that cleaning up the mess of this pseudoscientific racism can be, this "zombie science." Our time is limited and precious: thank you for spending some portion of it fighting back this wicked nonsense.
From Wikipedia:
"Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. . . 'The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.'"
Thanks for doing all the work, Eric!
my take on attempting to correlate intelligence with genomic factors: concentrate on identifying the top performing outliers- the leading tail. The .001. Obviously precocious achievers, like children who can read before age 3. The extraordinary performers. Do genomic profiles. Attempt to establish similarities in polygenic clusters, using as much detail as available. Such a study might at least establish some data touchpoints for expanding the investigation. But the focus of investigation should be in establishing strong genetic similarity among the most "gifted" individuals, not in studies of large population cohorts attempting to determine a median and a bell curve.
I admit to being so out of my depth in this research discipline that I don't know if any of that sort of study has already been done, or is in the process of being done. But searching for correlation associations between genes, polygenic clusters, and the "utility relationships" of such traits with specific advantages in mental processing, or a more general level of intellectual skill acuity, in order to identify the critical genotypic factors that might exist would seem to me to be the place to start.
There might be more than one sort of advantageous circuit design in that regard, of course. So to speak.
Studies attempting to correlate "skin lightness"* and "brain size"? That's just sad.
This has been tried, eg,
https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121.pdf Results are non-zero, but on the other hand not especially compelling. I agree that every intuition suggests that there ought to be something identifiable about those highly precocious individuals. It is remarkable that the genetic signal is so weak.
quite remarkable that a definitive result is so elusive, perhaps not even reliably accessible via genotypic identification. That this crown of creation unique to our species remains such a mystery.