Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
Or you're aware of how easily mistakes are made, how flawed the testing is and how the statistics are misunderstood and misrepresented.
I'm far less likely to be prosecuted for a crime I didn't commit if my DNA isn't available to be wrongly matched with that of a criminal.