Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Find Dozens of Genes Associated With Measures of Intelligence (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We don't know a lot about the biological basis of our mental abilities -- we can't even consistently agree on how best to test them -- but a few things seem clear. One is that performance on a number of standardized tests that purport to measure intelligence tends to correlate with outcomes we'd associate with intelligence, like educational achievement. A second is that this performance seems to have a large genetic component. But initial studies clearly indicated that the effect of any individual gene on intelligence is small. As a result, the first genetics studies found very little, since you needed to look at a large number of people in order to see these small effects. Now, a new study has combined much of the previous work and has turned up 40 new genetic regions associated with intelligence test scores. But again, the effect of any individual gene is pretty minor. The team behind the new work took advantage of open data to pull together information from 13 different studies, which cumulatively looked through the genomes of over 78,000 individuals. While those individuals had been given a variety of tests, the authors focused on measures of general intelligence or fluid intelligence (the two seem to measure similar things). The genomes of these individuals had been scanned for single base pair differences, allowing the authors to look for correlations between regions of the genome and test scores. Two separate analyses were done. The first simply looked at each base difference individually. That turned up 336 individual bases, which clustered into 22 different genes. Half of these had not been associated with intelligence previously. To provide a separate validation of these results, the authors did a similar analysis with educational achievement. They found that nearly all of the sites they identified also correlated with that. In a second analysis, the authors tracked base differences that cluster in a single gene. Since there are more markers for each gene, this tends to be a more sensitive way of looking for effects. And in fact, it produced 47 genes associated with the intelligence test scores. Seventeen of those had been identified in the earlier analysis, which brought the total genes identified to 52, only 12 of which had been previously associated with intelligence test scores.
You're not allowed to talk about the possibility of there being a genetic basis for variations in intelligence. Because some genes are more common in certain ethnic groups than others, and then all hell will break loose and you'll get Bellcurved.
This is a textbook example of p-hacking. Note the plural in "measures of intelligence", along with "educational achievement" as dependent variables. Something was gonna show a correlation, to the vaunted oh point oh five. What a crock.
882. We don't even need the links for these anymore, just the number.
I'm off to the feelies. I'm so glad I'm an Alpha.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
When I was born, I was the poster child for mongolism (the proper term in the 1970's) and promptly mentally declared retarded to because I had a speech impediment in kindergarten. You could say I was slow on the uptake. I also had an undiagnosed hearing loss in one ear that wasn't diagnosed until much later. Each year I had the annual evaluation. Each time I scored on the genius side of the scale. Each time the tester noted it was statistical fluke and reconfirmed that I was mentally retarded. That the school got extra funding for having a well behaved idiot in Special Ed classes wasn't a factor. I graduated the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension and fifth grade skills in everything else. School officials couldn't explain how that happened and they were also disturbed that my skinny parents had a fat kid. A half-dozen blood tests revealed nothing. No one knows how genes played a role in my intelligence.
“If you try to predict height using the genes we’ve identified in Europeans in Africans, you’d predict all Africans are five inches shorter than Europeans, which isn’t true,” Dr. Posthuma said.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
These results are from using SNP chips. To make a SNP chip, a sample of individuals from a population (in this case, humans of European descent) are sequenced, then the sequences are compared to find SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism: i.e. a place where some individuals have one DNA base and others have a different one.) Then some hundreds of thousands of those SNPs are selected (we want something like an even spread of SNPs over the genome, and we want to chose SNPs which have a fairly high degree of polymorphism - we'd rather something which was 50:50 rather than 99:1.) A SNP chip is designed which when exposed to DNA from an individual will say yes/no for each SNP. (Scanning the paper, I see two of the SNP chips they used were UK BiLEVE Axiom array and the UK Biobank Axiom array which have over 820,000 SNPs each.)
This has several consequences. One is that the SNP chip is of limited use for populations other than the one for which it was designed. Another is that seldom is the SNP on the chip directly related to the feature/quality (intelligence in this case) that we are trying to correlate with. Rather, the SNP which correlates positively with IQ is probably just nearby the genetic difference which matters. Because they are close, recombination (shuffling of the two genome copies you have, which happens in the production of gametes) is unlikely to separate them. Because they will occasionally get separated, the correlation of IQ with the SNP is going to be a little less strong than the correlation of IQ with the actual variant gene (allele). A SNP chip is less informative than a full genome sequence, but is much cheaper, and much easier to analyse.
A final point is that genome wide association studies like this have in the past been plagued with false positives. When there are so many variables being tested (hundreds of thousands of SNPs on the SNP chip) some will strongly associate with your measured quality (IQ) by chance. This is even more so if you use sophisticated analyses which look for combinations of SNPs as predictors. I will provisionally accept that they've accounted for this correctly, as I lack the expertise to judge for myself.
I work in a tangentially associated field (phylogenetics) so my knowledge has some professional basis, but is well short of that of an expert in the field.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
ALL the genes put together had a total of 5% impact on Intelligence. That means an IQ of 105 vs 100. That is a minor effect.
Worst of all, minor effects like this, are typical of false positives. That is, most scientific tests use a significance threshold of no more than 4%, which is one in 25. That means if you test 25 different random alcoholic drinks, one of them, by random chance, will be shown to cause a minor increase in intelligence. This would be a false positive.)
And they did over 300 tests. So if they are using a 4% significance, that would be 4*3= 12 false positives.
This article looks like the worst kind of fake science news. You know, the kind that a President would quote (Pick Trump/Obama, whichever your personal bias thinks would do that).
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
IQ test is an aggregate, a lot of questions testing different aspects of logical thinking and pattern spotting. Trying to find a single gene for IQ is a bit like trying to find which single screw makes a car engine work.
Instead, try correlating the genes against results from distinct questions from the IQ test. That way you can get genes responsible for specific aspects of IQ. Otherwise... found any singular gene that makes people perform well at chess-boxing?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Apparently iodine is the reason people today are marginally more intelligent than the were before.
http://blogs.discovermagazine....
That doesn't mean that genetics doesn't make a difference.
I sometimes think it would be more useful to discover the genes for common sense because I know quite a few highly-intelligent people who could do with having a bit more of it.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
There are certainly genetic components that contribute to intelligence. But you know what? It almost doesn't matter.
Fact is: the average IQ of a black African is around 70. Africa is a disaster, and all the aid from the rest of the world has not helped. A population with an average IQ of 70 cannot maintain a Western infrastructure without help. But we aren't allowed to talk about intelligence as a contributing factor. If we could, we might have different strategies for aid; strategies that might actually work.
And if it turns out that, after pulling Africa out of its hole, those 30 points of IQ are due to environmental factors, or disease, or education, or whatever? Everybody wins.
tl;dr: Before we can do anything about the problems in Africa, we have to be able to talk openly about intelligence.
IQ test were based partially on speed of completion. People a generation or two back started spending larger portions of their lives watching the world go by at 35+ mph. The theory is this led to an increase in speed of cognition led to a small but measurable increase in general IQ scores.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Odds are the smartest person in the whole world is illiterate and wasting many brain cycles while subsistence farming.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
...Ironically from the SJW folks.