Researchers Find Dozens of Genes Associated With Measures of Intelligence (arstechnica.com) 267
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.
didn't you get the memo (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: didn't you get the memo (Score:3, Insightful)
Top scientists who want to keep their jobs at universities agree: evolution stops at the neck.
Re: (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Domesticated_Red_Fox
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:4, Informative)
You're not allowed to talk about the possibility of there being a genetic basis for variations in intelligence.
The real problem here is that this is no absolute definition for intelligence because it's a quality. There is a lot of neuroscience that needs to be done before we should even broach the issue of genetic associations because "intelligence tests" are no more than crude attempts to quantify this quality that we cannot define.
And remember, correlation does not imply causation. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
That's not really the issue.
The issue is racists have used psuedo science too many times to justify unequal treatment under the law, unequal treatment in schooling and even eugenics (more than once too).
Good solid science will be helpful. But racists using bad science to justify for horrific evil behavior means we have to use caution going forward.
I *agree* that the far left often suppresses free speech but that is partially due to decades of bad behavior in the past around pseudo science by racists.
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:4, Insightful)
I would say the problem we encounter today is leftists suppressing science to justify horrific evil behavior, so we need an honest evaluation of the truth going forward.
It goes something like this. Assume there are no genetic differences in intellectual ability between people of recent European and African descent. Notice there is a difference in group average outcomes (income, test scores, job placement, etc) in the United States between people of recent European and African descent. Since you've already established (without proof, and contrary to empirical evidence as well as basic understanding of evouationary biology) that there is no difference in these populations' average natural ability, the difference in outcomes must be because of racism on the part of the European-Americans against the African-Americans. This justifies hatred and resentment against the European-Americans, and the use of government force to extract resources from the European-Americans or enforcement of different behavioral standards to "correct" their oppressive misdeeds. Naturally this will also be profitable for the people pushing this narrative.
If it turns out that no, in fact the reason for the difference in outcomes are largely genetic, then the entire justification for the redistribution and vilification falls apart. This is very bad for the left, so they have to forcibly shut down anyone who tells the truth about genetic differences between human haplogroups, insisting they are not just wrong, but also evil. This all ends very poorly.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it must be racism because blacks from european cultures and later immigrants from african countries do much better than descendents of blacks descended from slaves and blacks in southern states.
One of the largest problems with assistance based purely on race is that it means well connected wealthy blacks get extra money while poor blacks (and other minorities and whites) do not get extra money.
Assistance should be based on economic status- not the color of a person's skin.
And many awards have come to r
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it must be racism because blacks from european cultures and later immigrants from african countries do much better than descendents of blacks descended from slaves and blacks in southern states.
Think there might be some self-selection going on there? That is, only the wealthier, and therefore likely more intelligent blacks from Africa and Europe are able to immigrate to the US these days?
Your entire post just reeks of racism and begs exactly the point I was making above. Racists (as you appear to be) argue for changes RIGHT NOW cutting benefits for minorities based on an insufficient and biased set of data and on culturally biased and primitive "intelligence" tests.
Except the data is not insufficient, and the tests are not biased. You are not the first person to suggest this, so researchers have gone to great lengths to make and administer unbiased tests.
Science is a real thing. Genetics are real things. Evolutionary biology is a real thing.
Intelligence correlates with incom
Re: (Score:2)
Culture has a lot to do with income and education. My son was selected for a special program for talented young mathematicians. The selection was based on a test designed to be as culture- and education-neutral as they could (plus a a free-form question about why the kid wanted to join the program). Nomination was primarily by teachers looking at students' math abilities.
The test was pretty well swamped by people of Asian descent, and most of them simply didn't get in. They presumably excelled at mat
Re: (Score:2)
No, God's favor correlates with income. See how that works?
No, because God hates asians.
Re: (Score:2)
Basic understanding of evolutionary biology suggests that genetic differences between the intelligence (or any other genetically complex quality) of races is probably very small, if it exists. We divide races with some fairly simple genetic markers, and other than those the genetic differences between races are swamped by genetic differences within races.
We also know that the average European-American lives in a more favorable development environment than the average African-American, leading to higher
Re: didn't you get the memo (Score:3)
Are you kidding? Progressives and the American left have been the primary proponents of government treating people differently based on race. Segregation and anti miscegenation laws were progressive policies supposedly intended to help everybody. Today, affirmative action and racial quotas are again favorites of the left.
With the left, it's always good intentions and lousy outcomes.
Re: (Score:2)
You might want to check the 1950s and 1960s to see which people were involved in the big change in the legal climate that occurred then.
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Interesting)
However showing that there are dozen of genes. It would make sense racial factors would be a minor aspect. Also many of our racial distinctions have less to do about genetics and more about culture.
Intelligence is complex, while we may measure it in terms of IQ but there are many variations of it and a lot of it is also based environment.
You could have genes that would make you the strongest person in the world, but you never exercised so they are genetically inferior people who are stronger than you because they maximize their potential while you didn't. The same with intelagance you can have the won the genetic lottery in terms of intelligence. But you may not have worked it out, so if you take that IQ test your score wouldn't reflect your full potential.
Odds are... (Score:4, Insightful)
Odds are the smartest person in the whole world is illiterate and wasting many brain cycles while subsistence farming.
Re: (Score:2)
You're not allowed to talk about the possibility of there being a genetic basis for variations in intelligence.
But it's already accepted that the g-factor is heritable to a significant extent, isn't it?
Re: (Score:2)
A long time ago, I was told about a study done with child protection. There were a large number of women who were basically unfit to raise their children, and so the children were taken and placed in generally similar white middle-class households. The tested IQ of the mother plus twenty points was a good predictor of the child's IQ.
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Informative)
Charles Murray knows this all too well. He's been treated very poorly because of the controversial nature of his research. And from what I can tell he was meticulous in collecting and processing the data that lead him to the conclusion that intelligence has genetic factors. It would be a fluke for anything that has genetic factors to not express some divergence across populations. If your parents are tall there's a higher chance you will be tall. If your ethnicity is known for having dark hair the high chances are your hair will be dark. Similarly with IQ. Murray sought the data, came to this obvious conclusion and has been castigated for it for many years by SJWs who can't handle the truth.
Re: (Score:2)
If your parents are tall there's a higher chance you will be tall. If your ethnicity is known for having dark hair the high chances are your hair will be dark. Similarly with IQ.
But the problem with that argument is that heritability is not the same as genetics. If your parents have tattoos, their children are more likely to have tattoos. If the parents drive a fancy car, the children are more likely to drive a fancy car. Same can be said of IQ.
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:4, Informative)
If only we had some data on identical twins adopted into different families that would shed light on this mystery.
Oh, wait... [duckduckgo.com]
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also a long ugly history of even scientists ignoring scientific findings that are socially unacceptable.
Different mean and standard deviation of intelligence found in groups of people defined through genetic locus controlling for education, culture, diet, and socioeconomic status is one of them.
The person that can prove four decades of scientific evidence wrong will be quite famous. Until then, everyone tries very hard to ignore the evidence and pretend it doesn't exist, as this paper did.
Re: (Score:2)
"There is also a long ugly history of even scientists ignoring scientific findings that are socially unacceptable."
Totally understandable when you consider that researchers need to get funded somehow.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While that is true, it does not mean that there is no genetic basis for differences in intelligence.
Questioning motives in order to shut down discussion that is uncomfortable to some prevents society from accepting reality. Most of the technological progress we have today resulted from the efforts of those many would consider questionable under various ideologies and belief systems.
Politeness is just a form of white lying, really, and it should not be considered when trying to determine truth. There are ple
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Insightful)
One issue is comparing heritability within a group with differences between groups.
The old argument goes something like this. Within middle class white Americans, IQ is highly heritable. Black Americans and new immigrants from Eastern Europe (this is around 1910 when there were many such immigrants) score much worse than middle class white Americans on IQ tests. Because IQ is heritable, the Blacks and Eastern Europeans must be genetically inferior.
There are (at least) two major problems with this line of reasoning. One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes.
A good example of this second point is height. Height is more heritable than IQ, but is also affected by childhood nutrition. As a people become affluent, average height increases, even though the genes are not changing.
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:4, Insightful)
Excellent points. The same topic came up towards the end of a recent podcast of Sam Harris (link [youtube.com], the discussion about IQ starts sometime after the 1 hour 30 minute mark) which had as a guest the cancer physician and researcher. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The point made by Mukherjee is that available evidence suggests that IQ is heritable but not inherited. So genetic factors certainly play into shaping an individuals IQ, but it doesn't mean the offspring of someone with high or really high IQ will inherit that trait.
And even if it turns out that genes account for 100 % of IQ variation that still does not eliminate the role of the environment and upbringing on how those genes (and hence, IQ) are expressed: [wordpress.com]
Re: (Score:2)
...One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes...
If general intelligence were really a thing with powerful correlations to all kinds of intelligence, as advertised, then we could use any kind of learning test to determine IQ. Such as....
Dancing!!!
To determine who are the Alphas, we should just line up all the 18 year olds in the gym, teach them a new dance routine, video tape it, and have judges pick out the best dancers to bless with the prizes.
Of course, such will never happen because we all know that IQ tests are culturally bias. We want them to be
Re: (Score:2)
A major problem with your line of reasoning is that testing has improved somewhat over the last century. They don't have questions about regattas any more.
Re: (Score:2)
Show me the cultural bias in the tests.
I know that you are trolling, but I will bite. An example of a question in an IQ test could be...
The words “inclusive” and “exclusive” have:
What would be your answer? When it comes to questions asking about language (in many different ways), those who aren't culturally English speaking country would attempt to translate the word. Often time, one English word can be more than one word/meaning in the native language
Re: (Score:2)
I'd have to get into the details of the tests to show it, but I'll give you examples from my last test.
I was told a couple of stories about everyday activities, and asked how many details I remembered. When listening, I was able to filter out the stuff to be expected and concentrate on the important details. If I wasn't as familiar with the "to be expected", I'd have been trying to remember more details. If some of the details had been unusual, I'd have remembered them differently.
I was read a list
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Interesting)
That doesn't seem like a good enough reason to put the kibosh on the study of intelligence. The racial angle is weak. Everyone that matters knows racial differences are small. But what we have to gain by learning about intelligence is huge. We can learn about learning disorders. We can try to ameliorate the damage of dementia. Granted that this also opens up a can of worms regarding what interventions are ethical, but that's not a racial issue.
The fact that something could--if you bend over backwards by ignoring the actual numbers--be used to promote racism shouldn't be a reason not to discuss it candidly when the context is bettering everybody's lives.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The "ugly history" and the "people" you're talking about are government policies and government agencies saying "because group X is less intelligent on average, we need to adopt policy Y". But the problem there is not with the premise (which may or may not be true), it's with the conclusion. And it's racist and harmful whether policy Y is "anti-miscegenation" or "affirmative action", both (historically) favorites of progressi
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Interesting)
statistical evidence that certain ethnic groups display on average higher intelligence than others (such as whites as compared to blacks).
IQ is not the same as intelligence, although it is almost certainly highly correlated.
Whites are not on top. Both Jews and East Asians score higher on average.
In America, blacks have mean IQ scores about 0.7 SD, or about 10 points, lower than whites.
Black children have, on average, twice the blood lead levels of white children.
The first large scale IQ testing in America was of recruits during the First World War, in 1917.
In those 1917 tests, the average score was 15 points below today's average.
A century ago, there was a 15 point gap in IQ scores between Protestant and Catholics in Ireland.
Today there is no gap.
So is the "IQ gap" caused by genetics? Maybe, but similar gaps in the past were not.
Iodine is the US gap (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently iodine is the reason people today are marginally more intelligent than the were before.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.... [discovermagazine.com]
That doesn't mean that genetics doesn't make a difference.
Increase in general IQ (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen counts of repetitions. Last I took such a test, I was given a list of words and asked for them several times until I repeated them all back perfectly. I suspect that went into the score. I got a Tower of Hanoi test that was explicitly not timed, and graded based on number of false moves, which of course I didn't make. (All you need for that is a good understanding and patience for detail.)
It doesn't even matter if intelligence is genetic (Score:2, Insightful)
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 wo
Re:didn't you get the memo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Races are artificial and are scientifically meaningless; genetics is reality.
This is worth repeating. 'Race' is largely determined by skin color and a small number of other features. It's not a very good way to measure someone's other genetic traits.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm more uncomfortable with the stupidity of some groups. But usually they're not ethnic, they're more a matter of association.
Get Ready for Science Denial... (Score:2, Insightful)
...Ironically from the SJW folks.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not like stupidity accumulates more on one side of the fence. SJWs, religious nutjobs, it's all good.
p hacking (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:p hacking (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:p hacking (Score:5, Informative)
It's very possible. The effect found by each of these genes was very small, a fraction of an IQ point. At that small size, I would doubt that I had accounted for all confounding variables. Something as simple as hair color might be a confounding factor, and height certainly would be [wikipedia.org].
However, if you really look at the study, you should see that it has NOTHING to do with the GP accusation. I have no idea why the GP is so negative on the study??? Also, how could the post be insightful??? Abstract below...
Intelligence is associated with important economic and health-related life outcomes. Despite intelligence having substantial heritability (0.54) and a confirmed polygenic nature, initial genetic studies were mostly underpowered. Here we report a meta-analysis for intelligence of 78,308 individuals. We identify 336 associated SNPs (METAL P < 5 × 10^-8) in 18 genomic loci, of which 15 are new. Around half of the SNPs are located inside a gene, implicating 22 genes, of which 11 are new findings. Gene-based analyses identified an additional 30 genes (MAGMA P < 2.73 × 10^-6), of which all but one had not been implicated previously. We show that the identified genes are predominantly expressed in brain tissue, and pathway analysis indicates the involvement of genes regulating cell development (MAGMA competitive P = 3.5 × 10^-6). Despite the well-known difference in twin-based heratiblity for intelligence in childhood (0.45) and adulthood (0.80), we show substantial genetic correlation (rg = 0.89, LD score regression P = 5.4 × 10^-29). These findings provide new insight into the genetic architecture of intelligence.
And the title of the study is "Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence" which has nothing to do with the GP accusation (again)...
Re: (Score:3)
It passed peer review in a high quality journal. While this doesn't completely rule out p-hacking, at the very least it means you shouldn't make the accusation without closely reading the paper.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you look at the p values for this study? Are they only .05?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But if you look at the study, the p-values for individual SNPs range from 5*10^-4 to 9*10^-14.
Sure, absolutely, do further research. But to start accusing them of p-hacking when in fact their p-values are absolutely fantastic (ten to the minus fourteen?!) is incredibly unfair on your part. Maybe some motivated reasoning on your part here?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly do you think those papers mean? What do you think p-hacking is?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even if they didn't do anything else, their p-levels are 10^-6 to 10^-8. You're welcome to try to explain how to produce that with "p-hacking" in this study.
In addition, it's clear that intelligence is highly heritable, so why wouldn't the default conclusion be (absent other evidence) that the most strongly correlated markers are the ones that are responsible?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, because if you look at enough variables, given a truly random set, some portion of the variables are going to appear non-random. P-hacking isn't just twisting knobs to show something, it can also be looking at enough knobs. https://xkcd.com/882/
Re: (Score:2)
True, but the p-values here are 10^-6 to 10^-8.
Intelligence is heritable (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
On computer labs, new books, lots of funding, support by experts in emerging educational computer languages, arts, languages, math, science, computer networks per school, new robot kits, GUI code, US wide math and science funding since the 1950's, extra staff per class.
Better daily food, generations of well educated teachers, the ability to be granted easy acce
Re: (Score:2)
The heritability of IQ [wikipedia.org] is usually quantified as the portion of the variance in IQ accounted for by genetics. That's about 0.75 for adults, making it very strongly genetically determined.
No time to read the article.... (Score:3)
I'm off to the feelies. I'm so glad I'm an Alpha.
Re: (Score:2)
Please do not correct this Wolfgang Delta fellow. ;)
For the Mongos among us... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Sick, and apt, burn!
Re: (Score:2)
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
Unlikely. My mother didn't start drinking until after I was born. I have the opposite symptoms than what is associated with FAS.
Problems may include an abnormal appearance, short height, low body weight, small head size, poor coordination, low intelligence, behavior problems, and problems with hearing or seeing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_spectrum_disorder [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> single misconfigured switch
> cisco didn't properly design their flagship server
Your reading comprehension is lacking. You missed my opening statement: "The one situation that I was aware of [...]"
Re: (Score:2)
For a self-proclaimed genius, you sure do have trouble with basic comprehension.
You failed to comprehend that I pick and chose what I want to answer. I gave you a real life example from my work experience when you wanted me to answer an imaginary example that you pulled out of your ass.
Re: (Score:2)
"Skinny parents" can easily have a "fat kid" - why is this so shocking to you, or anybody else?
I was always the proverbial fat kid at school. A sixth-grade principal tried to fat shame my parents because his logical conclusion was that my parents were fat. Except my parents were skinny — and I ate what they ate. So the school ordered blood tests, which didn't find anything unusual.
But someday you'll realize that the only thing keeping you fat is your refusal to acknowledge that your eating habits are not working for you, and that you need to accept a little advice from other people who know something about the topic.
Meanwhile, I'm watching my belly shrink on my low-carb diet and exercise program.
Re: (Score:2)
Because I've seen you claiming 350 here since forever.
Correct.
Re: (Score:2)
So you're staying the same weight, but you think you're losing significant fat by walking at an extremely slow rate for 20 minutes every couple days?
Walking on the treadmill is one component of my workout. Pulling 75 reps @ 75 pounds and 15 reps @ 150 pounds on the sit-up rowing machine is another component of my workout. There are other components to my workout that I haven't share on Slashdot. I'm too easily amused by all the half-assed assumptions that are made on what little information I provide.
Re: (Score:2)
You should be studied by science, because the whole thing where your weight is unrelated to how much you eat defies any expectation.
I had a college roommate who was skinny, underweight according to the doctor, and I could never gain weight no matter how many Big Macs he stuffed down each day. Despite being underweight, the FBI accepted him as an armed network technician.
Re: (Score:2)
Otherwise, you're gonna die young, kiddo.
I've been hearing that for decades for now. Here's the problem with that assessment: I don't believe it and I don't let it stop me from living. That's the real problem you have with me.
You are not built like a body-builder [...]
Broad shoulders, narrow waist. The potential is there.
[...] you are not even built like a football player.
I'm frequently asked if I ever played high school or college football. People are often surprised that I haven't. I was a butterball when I was younger. After I did long-distance bike riding (20+ miles) for three years, I started going to the gym 15+ years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Your concept of long-distance biking is ... interesting.
I had a restaurant job and lived ten miles away. So I rode my bike six days a week. The longest bike trip I ever made in one day was 36 miles.
And your gym workouts of 20 minutes of walking and 5 minutes of rowing...
Are only two components of my workout that I shared about on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
[..] how long after the restaurant hired you did they go out of business?
The Old Spaghetti Factory in San Jose is still in business.
http://www.osf.com/location/san-jose-ca/ [osf.com].
When did they figure out that the terrible shrieking and tearing sounds from the basement was actually you eating all their profits?
The kitchen manager was bigger and taller than me. According to his father (who is bigger and taller at 7'-0"), kitchen manager was the runt (smallest) of the family. After having spaghetti dinners for three years in a row, I didn't eat spaghetti for the next seven years.
Yes, after 15 years of your daily 20 minutes of treadmill, you can powerwalk to the fridge like an Olympian! Even a hyena would blush in shame at how you attack a fridge!
It's painfully obvious that fat people make you stupider.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, I guess I meant "the terrible growling and slurping sounds from the basement".
The only time noise became an issue is when the kitchen manager and I drink small bottles of hot sauce to stare each other down. We would both turned bright red and sweat profusely. The Mexicans on the line were hooting and hollering. My boss always looked away. I always get these loud hiccups. The front of the house manager would ask me to go outside because people in the restaurant could hear me..
Re: (Score:2)
1) Drastically curtailed (or perhaps even eliminated) your sex life, unless you're wasting a shitload of money by paying for it;
The boys downstairs disagree — and are still perky as ever. Especially with volume. The girls don't call me Heavy Creamer for nothing.
2) Dramatically reduced your ability to enjoy activities that involve getting up from your chair;
The desk chair that I get up from every 45 minutes to take a walk?
3) Subjected you to uncountable aches, pains and other inconveniences which make day-to-day living less enjoyable.
The only aches I have are from working out at the gym. Or when I spend eight hours walking around or standing in lines at the comic cons.
And you're still a butterball.
Butterballs don't have thin waists.
If the photo you've been sharing here is after 15+ years of working out at the gym, you should really ask for your money back.
I should get my money back on allergy medication. Every Spring I get sick when the roses are in full bloom. That's the only I'm ever s
Re: (Score:2)
And ultimately, the link between being morbidly obese and dying early is very well established.
For fat people who don't exercise, don't diet and gave in to the naysayers. I do exercise, I do diet and I keep a positive attitude in the face of overwhelming negativity. And 99.9% of the negativity comes from Slashdot. The only time someone made an issue of my weight in real life was when a coworker announced during a meeting that I needed lap-band surgery — and then he wondered why everyone treated him like a douche bag after the meeting.
Re: (Score:2)
Have you EVER been to see a doctor about your inability to lose weight?
The last doctor I've been to 15 years ago when he told me I was fat and tried to poke me in the stomach. He almost broke his finger. Muscle is harder than fat. He then kicked me out of his office. After that incident, I stopped seeing doctors entirely. My doctor prior to him never talked to me about my weight since I'm physically a big guy and not just overweight.
Height genes (Score:3)
“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.
A few technical comments (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All true, but not really all that relevant. They weren't trying to show that IQ has a strong genetic component, that's been established for a long time, they were trying to identify genes that actually were responsible for that genetic component. As such, finding many genes, each of which has a small effect, is consistent with what we already know about the genetics of IQ. That is, their paper effectively says "this set of genes (and more like them) could account for the genetics of IQ that we actually obse
Five Percent is the important number (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re: (Score:3)
You cannot calculate with it IQ scores like that. A 50% impact does not mean the difference of 150 to 100, or a 100% impact does not mean 200 to 100. For one thing, while the mean IQ is 100, that in itself means nothing unless you also pick a standard deviation, which is an arbitrary choice. I think 15 is the most commonly used, but by no means only, choice for IQ nowadays. This would mean that a score of 115 is one standard deviation above average, or that 68% of people fall below it, and a score of 130 is
Re: (Score:2)
But the thing is, the IQ scores that we're talking about are not direct measured scores, and therefore the 15 point choice is entirely arbitrary, in that they could just as well have chosen the standard deviation to be 24 or 32 (and some testers did). It's not in any way a measured quantity; rather, they measure the percentile and calculate the IQ score from it. An IQ score of 115 from a test with std 15 is exactly the same as an IQ score of 124 from a test of std 24. Neither provides more or less informati
Re:Five Percent is the important number (Score:4, Interesting)
They aren't asking the question of whether IQ has a strong genetic component, that's already known. They are asking which genes might be responsible for the genetic component that we already know exists.
Why don't you read RTFA? Their p-values are 10^-6 to 10^-8. In addition, they seem to be using software and techniques specifically intended for these kinds of analyses. Now, there could still be plenty of things wrong with their analysis, but your criticism is not valid.
Furthermore, they are not asking "are there any genes that influence IQ", they are asking "given that we know that IQ has a strong genetic component, which genes might be responsible".
The fact that they didn't find any strong correlations but a lot of weak correlations is a useful result in itself; you simply seem to misinterpret what the result actually means.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You have misunderstood what is going on.
1) It is true that every year they reset the average IQ to be equal to 100.
2) But the questions in general do not change. Instead what they do is reset the number of correct answers neccessary to get a "100". That is, in 2016, getting say 87 right might give you a score of 100, but in 2017, you need to get 88 question right to get the same score of 100. This is called 'grading on a curve'.
3) This means that YES, the average has in fact been changing. Historic
Not to mention (Score:2)
...that in some people, they are all switched off. Sad.
Match against questions! (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Match against questions! (Score:5, Insightful)
This "theory of multiple intelligences" is a quite popular narrative, but it's not empirically supported by studies. Rather, it seems that there is one "g factor", or general cognitive ability, that tends to explain quite well the "different kinds of intelligence". That is, any IQ test seems to be a good predictor of performance in any other IQ test, whether testing logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial or some other "kind" of intelligence.
Re: (Score:2)
That's what IQ tests do, but that's not what they measure. What IQ tests measure is the factor that's common to all those different expressions of intelligence.
Researchers aren't trying to find "a single gene", they are looking for many genes, each of which individually contributes a little to
Intelligence isn't everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I would think that common sense in terms of having a good general set of priorities for dealing with unfamiliar situations is probably trainable and seems a reasonable thing to develop
But too often the people I hear complaining about lack of common sense are those that deride actual experience and knowledge of what to do in a given situation
present company excepted of course
Paragraphs (Score:2)
Is there a gene for using paragraphs instead of a wall of text?
With all those genes (Score:2)
For crazy scientists applying these genes to other species might end up in scary or interesting results.
Imagine raccoons with the IQ level of Einstein.