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New vs. Old: a Comparison of 23andMe's Health Reports and the Raw Data (enlis.com)
"With much fanfare," writes an anonymous reader, "last month 23andMe returned to reporting health information to their genetic service customers. How does their new service stack up?" According to the Enlis Genomics Blog, it's a good move but not perfect. The linked post explains that "the raw data from 23andMe contains significantly more health information than they are reporting in their health reports," and says "23andme has a long way to go to get back to reporting the same number of variants they were before the FDA ban. However – both the previous and new 23andMe reports pale in comparison to an analysis of the raw data. 23andMe’s new reports tell you about less that 1% of the health-related variants that are in their raw data." It's an interesting statistical blow-by-blow; the company making the comparison has a vested interest in you letting them run the numbers, but is not the only option.
It will make building a national database that much easier for police to scour.
c'mon, man.
According to the data, one can predict the stupidity of a Slashdot comment by whether the poster is an Anonymous Coward. Studies have proven this time and time again.
Data, like hips, don't lie.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Instead of opening your data up to yet another corporation by trusting someone else to analyze your raw data, why not create an open source application that you can download to analyze your raw genetic data? I'm sure the molecular biologists out there would be more than willing to help contribute.
"It's also unscientific to ignore peer-reviewed research that shows conclusively there is absolutely no difference in intelligence level "
That would be the case, were it true. But it isn't, sadly. It is so much easier to just wave your hands and claim that we are all the same, but we aren't. It might not even be genetic. I suspect that anyone who was born with dark skin would see a similar, if less pronounced effect as the sheep wearing the scary mask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Human brains all work the same. Problem is that human brains interpret differing skin colors to have differing characteristics, something that might just be a self fulfilling prophesy. One that can only be solved by that most anti-liberal of solutions--segregation.
Clearly nobody read the link, because it's one big fat ad for a third-party genome-analysis tool and nobody's complained yet. Come on, people, keep up!
Every IQ tests proves it to the point where it is a statistical certainty.
Do you really believe skin color, bone shape, muscle mass etc can be determined by genetics but the brain is somehow immune?
The range of IQ scores of blacks and whites overlap. Many blacks are smarter than the average white, and many whites are dumber than the average black.
You cannot take any random black person and know if that single individual's IQ score is lower, average or higher than the mean IQ score for whites.
You especially cannot know, if taking one random black and one random white, which has the higher score. You can know the probabilities for the groups, but you cannot know for any two individuals. I find that most people cannot understand this. Maybe people are dumb.
There are too many people who, when they hear that "The mean IQ score of blacks is less than the mean IQ score of whites", they believe that means "All blacks are dumber than any white person". Or, more likely, "I'm smarter than any black person".
You can define groups of humans based on almost any variable, test them, and you'll find the two groups have a different mean IQ score.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
These are people who are nearly identical genetically, but look at the differences in scores.
Says the man who's mother didn't take thalidomide. Thank you FDA!
Every IQ test shows that you can alter the test to make any identifiable group "smarter" than another, if you choose. Yes, you could make an IQ test that would show Black people smarter than whites.
And yes, genetics is linked to physical characteristics, but there's been no proven link between race and those characteristics. Short Chinese people is a myth. It's mostly a product of their lower protein diet, and not genetics, but a racist glancing at them who believes in eugenics would try to breed the short out of them, when it's not in their genes.
It's that type of bigoted racism that people knee jerk against. Test the poorest poor whites in rural West Virginia against the top 10% (money, not IQ) of Blacks and you'll find a random selection from those groups shows Blacks smarter than whites. So, then what's the issue? Race? Or quality of life? But no, pointing out that poor people test worse gets the assertion that being dumb makes one poor, when the tests more closely show that being poor causes being dumb.
So yes, there is some genetics in the brain, but if you are looking at the wrong numbers, you'll get the wrong conclusion, and look like a racist bigot at the same time.
Learn to love Alaska
"So, human skin color determines other characteristics?"
If you don't believe that, then you don't believe in racial discrimination. Skin color doesn't directly dictate characteristics. IE an all white or an all black society can and have historically been equally barbarous or ascendant. But mix the two together and something strange happens. The society stratifies according to skin tone. This has happened in many entirely separate cultures (India being a good examples--dark skinned South Indians have rarely ruled over light skinned North Indians). This is clearly not due to some inherent mental defect caused by increased melanin production, but by societal interaction. Placing more trust in light skinned people, and less trust in dark skinned people. Even the Incas were said to be ruled by light skinned (and even blond headed) people, where the Aztecs worshipped some ancient whites they may have encountered as gods (and thus perhaps mistook blond haired, blue-eyed Spaniards for Gods). White skin is bad for you, in that it increases skin cancer. Light colored eyes are bad for you as well, as you more quickly lose your sight in old age. Yet these characteristics have been strongly preserved. There must be a reason for that.
" Too bad IQ tests are a poor indicator of overall intelligence"
No, it is a very good indicator of that. It's just that it correlates almost exactly with skin color, more precisely than with genetics (ie Australian aboriginals and Southern Indians have very low IQs on average, not just Africans, or some certain subset of Africans, as would otherwise be predicted by genetic theory).
It seems to me that skin color causes other people to behave differently towards you. As shown in studies of the perceptions of young children (http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2553348&page=1), dark skin is perceived as "bad", "ugly", "masculine", "dishonest" where white skin was perceived as the opposite. Think about how interactions with people who have such genetically defined prejudice against you would effect your development. This is what we call a "self fulfilling prophesy". Kids who aren't trusted tend to be more anti-social--period. This is well known, as kids, including white kids, who get caught in the system tend to remain in it and become ever more criminal. IE they are treated like criminals, so they become criminals.
Failing to recognize these features/biases in human cognition doesn't help anyone. It only hurts us. ALL of us. Most especially the disadvantaged groups we claim that we are trying to help. Fact is: they need to be isolated from white people, because they trust them more than they should, at the expense of their own who are trusted less than they should be, based on individual merit. Communities like Greenwood prospered, until they ran afoul of whites. Then they were annihilated. The current system certainly seems to have failed blacks. Seems like it is time for a change.
White people lived in mud huts until not that long ago. And only a few of the most traditional societies in Africa still live like that, or those in the most oppressed, anti-capitalistic societies. Capitalist nations, like Botswana, boast GDPs that rival first world nations, and are really only called anything other than first world because they have crappy neighbors.
You assume we compare poor impoverished blacks with everyone else.
Take the top 10% of every race and you will see blacks are always at the bottom, along with asians above whites and ashkenazi jews above all.
Would you mind explaining how an IQ test could be made to favor blacks above whites/asians/jews?
I can't see how that would work.
How do you know? They might be typing with their flippers.
What? It could happen.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Well, you could try going to live like the San people. I suspect you're probably not smart enough to do that. Point being, intelligence is a difficult thing to quantify and an IQ test isn't necessarily the best tool to determine such. It's just not a good quantifier. We could also argue the relevance of morality and situational ethics. We could also discuss the impact of poverty on intelligence or, more specifically, how it correlates to test results. I'd also submit that the IQ, as mentioned, is hardly a good metric. To have a standardized result then, if you insist, we can use that but it's up to you to demonstrate the importance.
All-in-all, it's rather subjective but I don't think we shouldn't talk about it. I just think we should talk about it like grownups.
So, how about you go ahead and tell us what your point is, what you think we should do about it, and how you feel it is relevant to the topic at hand. I'll be more than happy to have a mature and reasonable conversation with you.
Full disclosure: I'm mixed racially. I'm Native American (Micmac), Irish/English, and Black African (in order of percentage). I am not a geneticist. I do hold a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics and can understand statistics and have a reasonable grasp of logic.
So, sure... Let's have that discussion. What's your point? What do you think we should do? Why? How will it help? What's the goal? And how does it tie in with this research?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You can call him Pontiff and his last name is Ratzo, he'd not make this up. They can't tell lies on the internet, you know.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
So, human skin color determines other characteristics?
Human skin certainly determines the susceptibility to certain kinds of cancer. And skin color correlates well with incidence of sickle cell anemia. And skin color correlates well with salt sensitivity (for heart disease, not taste). Skin matters for lots. But it hasn't been shown to correlate for many other things. It seems reasonable to assume it will correlate with some physical characteristics (like gender and height), and mental characteristics. But so far, no conclusive links have been found. And lots of people have looked really hard.
Learn to love Alaska
I've traveled a lot in Africa (Botswana, Uganda, Kenya, Namibia to name a few) and mud constructions are still pretty much the norm for most villages - concrete or modern construction is sometimes utilised, but oftentimes a family simply cannot afford those construction methods - so they resort to mud bricks which have been kiln dried. The only consistent modern material used is corrugated metal for the roof.
Says the man who's mother didn't take thalidomide. Thank you FDA!
Sometimes the FDA does good things and sometimes the FDA does bad things.
I've gone to a number of talks by experts in molecular genetics (i.e. experts in interpreting individual genome sequences to understand genetic disease) and I was a bit surprised that there's pretty much universal consensus that the FDA got it wrong when they shut down 23andMe's health reporting.
What you have to understand is that the quality of the underlying tests used by 23andMe was the same as what you'd get if you ordered the test through a medical doctor (i.e. both CLIA certified). And the interpretations that 23andMe were also as good as what you'd get from a medical doctor. The difference was that, in the case of 23andMe, the interpretations were provided by a website - as opposed to being provided in person by a medical doctor.
So there were a small number of genetic counselors who resented being cut out of the loop. The claim was that it was possible to explain the interpretations/results better in person than via a website. Now, there were actually a number of studies done which didn't show any real benefit to in-person explanations. And, as an aside, as someone who spent entire semesters trying to teach introductory biology to community college students, that makes a lot of sense to me: no matter how brilliant you are, there's a limit to how much biology you can explain to an average person in even face-to-face meeting that lasts an hour - and many medical doctors only meet with their patients for 5-10 minutes.
I don't have any problem with regulating things like brain surgery and even drugs where the wrong dose can kill you. And I'm even OK with regulating blatantly false or misleading information in certain limited contexts. But there's also the right to freedom of speech. When the FDA steps in an won't let a company post useful health information that represents the current expert consensus, that seems to me to be crossing a line.
In the ideal world, if the FDA disagreed with 23andMe's interpretation of any of the variants then they would have created their own website that explained the official government interpretation of each variant. A person could take their 23andMe data and upload it to the government website and get the official government interpretation.
Ok, this is very simple, and something all the developers here need to know.
If you're reporting medical information in the US, you need all of the processes you use to generate that health information to go through the FDA before you ADVERTISE you can do it (yes, your website is an advertisement). Fitness is fine any time, go crazy with that. Medical information, only after FDA approval. If you think you may be doing something health related, go find a regulatory consultant and find out what you need to do before you get a shut down letter from the FDA!
For Enlis to write up a document essentially kicking 23andme for adhering to the law, after witnessing what happened to 23andme (and now Theranos) is the height of stupidity. 23andme was shut down, and it's executives were headed toward fraud indictments when the heroic efforts of their regulatory team saved them. That's what's coming for Enlis after this article.
It may be a year or two before the FDA gets to them, but this will be a black mark that will be extraordinarily hard for them to escape. They have just screwed themselves and their investors. The FDA-23andme saga has provided the biotech space with crystal clear instructions on what is necessary to report medical info from genetic data, and Enlis just danced right over those regulations. Very, very, stupid for them to post this article.
Your arguments are flawed. There is no genetically defined prejudice against people with different skin color. There is a socially-inclined prejudice, but change the societal environment, and it disappears. Hint: we grew up too poor to afford the *luxury* of being racist. We had more important things to worry about than the color of our friends skin.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"There is no genetically defined prejudice against people with different skin color"
Nope, sorry. This is shown in videos of the youngest children. Babies focus more on white dolls than black ones. Facts won't go away just because they are uncomfortable.
Also, just waving your hands around and saying "that isn't so" isn't proof.
"we grew up too poor to afford the *luxury* of being racist. We had more important things to worry about than the color of our friends skin"
You act as if that is some kind of point. This has nothing to do with being friends with anyone. Most white people have black friends. I do and have since I was a little boy. That doesn't change the fact that blacks are perceived as being more masculine and less trustworthy based solely on skin color (as shown with the same effect occurring in India), and that this occurs in all human societies, including those populated entirely by black people.
Purchasing power parity (PPP). That $7000 a year buys the equivalent of a middle class lifestyle there.
Villages. Try towns and cities.
And kiln-fired mud bricks are NOT the components used to make a mud hut. That would be sticks and mud.
"And most of Africa is Capitalist"
I see you, like the vast majority of people, have no idea what that term means. HINT: If you have a central bank, you aren't capitalist. HINT 2: If you have corrupt, thieving government officials, then you aren't anywhere NEAR capitalist. The role of government in a capitalist society is to prevent and punish aggression from within and without. Not to rob the people and enrich those in power.
What you are saying is that there are no capitalist countries? If that's true in the same way there are no communist countries nor fascist ones. But that says little about anything.
Bricks? That's not what most of us call mud. :P
Claiming that mud huts is some indicator of intelligence (as the clueless fuck above tries to do) is in itself laughable - if anything it is an indication of intelligence. There are less complex huts that can be made but mud is cheap, ecologic, easy to work with and (if used correctly) a near perfect match to the climate. Why build western style houses when they would be much more expensive and much harder to maintain where the weather is extremely wet for long periods followed by extreme heat for long periods, not to mention that in many places in Africa there is very little wood usable for construction - heck in some places there aren't enough to cook on.
That can still be attributed to other factors. Show me the etiology, the genes that you just claim genetically defines prejudice against people with skin color. You claim they exist, so where are they already? Or, as you say, 'Waving your hands around and saying "that IS so" isn't proof either.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
But it never does anything out of the blue.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Humans are different because they have souls.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's trivially easy but it proves nothing. But would that test be a valid yardstick or predictor of ability & success within groups?
If you wrote the test in French, for example, it would make French people look a lot smarter than Americans. But would it be able to distinguish smart French people from their less intellectually gifted compatriots?
If the answer is no, you aren't testing what you claim to be testing. Some old tests did have this fault, which is perhaps why some people claim they're general knowledge tests. Modern tests don't have questions like "yacht is to ____ as chukka is to polo".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So, human skin color determines other characteristics?
Usually not, but it often correlates with other characteristics. For example, white skin tend to correlate with long nose although AFAIK they are completely separate traits. There are other indisputable correlations between skin color and other biological traits. So I don't think it is much of a stretch to assume that there are correlations with higher functions too.
Interracial procreation can blur these differences but we need both a change of mindset and a few generations to get there. Sexual preference still goes towards the same race group.
Culture matters too, but guess what, there are also correlations between culture and skin color too, and despite all the good talk about the "melting pot", the line may be a little bit blurry but it is still there.
Oh and sorry for beating the dead horse but you don't believe that correlation implies causation, do you?
White skin is bad for you, in that it increases skin cancer. Light colored eyes are bad for you as well, as you more quickly lose your sight in old age. Yet these characteristics have been strongly preserved. There must be a reason for that.
Yes, that's called vitamin D.
UV light do two things to the skin : damage it, which is bad, and give vitamin D, which is good. You can't separate the two.
As a result, people from the north, where there is very little sunlight especially during the winter, have light skin as a way to get as much vitamin D as possible, whereas people from near the tropics where there is plenty of sunlight have dark skin as a natural sunscreen to prevent UV-related skin damage.
The eye color is related to the skin color because melanin is what makes both skin and eyes dark.
Another thing is 80 year life spans are a new thing. Traits that may prove an advantage passed 50 didn't matter that much from an evolutionary point of view when few people even got to that age, and if they could, probably didn't reproduce passed it.
No, I don't believe that correlation necessarily implies causation. I also don't think that IQ tests correlate with intelligence. If the IQ tests were designed by the Inuit, we'd mostly be classified as severely retarded.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That's trivially easy but it proves nothing.
It proves the test is arbitrary, and not a measure of Racial Supremacy, as the OP suggested. You seem to be agreeing with my point, but disagreeing with my manner of presenting it.
Learn to love Alaska
There is a continuum. Currently every "capitalist" country actually has a mixed market (ie they have a central bank and thus the centrally plan the price of money, the foundation of free exchange) rapidly sliding into one form of socialism or another. Those that adhere most closely to the capitalist ideal do the best (think Singapore), while those that stray the furthest inevitably collapse (think Zimbabwe--and note that we have the exact same monetary policy as they did leading up to their hyperinflation).