CharonY

One of the recurrent arguments posts that are made touch upon intelligence in humans and its heritability. Almost in every case there are serious misconceptions that result in the same type of often fruitless discussions conducted over and over again. In this thread I would like to clear up some issues to the best of my abilities. While I will stick to present literature, I am not an expert in the area of intelligence research. Hopefully, I will provide enough information to start a proper discussion or at least to clear up some low-level confusion. I will preface by stating that many studies utilize measures such as IQ, which is generally accepted not to be a precise measure of intelligence. Nonetheless there is more comparable data using this type of measurement and I will start the discussions centered around this simplified measure. The first obvious question is: "What is heritability?" What some erroneously assume is that it is fixed value that indicates the genetic influence of a given trait. For example, various literature estimate heritability of IQ to be between 0.4-0.8 and some equate that to saying that IQ is up to 80% under genetic control. However this interpretation is not correct. The estimation of heritability is given as the ratio of genetic variation to total variation in a trait within a given population. What often causes confusion is the population bit. It actually means that (in this case) up to 80% of the observed variance across individuals is genetic. This is completely different to the assertion that 80% of the trait is under genetic control. This has several consequences: 1) Obviously using this measure you cannot elucidate the contribution of environment and genetics to the individual. In other words, in one person the genetic component to their IQ may be high, in another it may be low, but the measure of heritance will not resolve that. 2) Related to that it means that looking at different populations the measure of heritability will change. It is not a fixed constant. 3) Conversely, the same population could yield very different heritability scores, depending on environmental conditions. For example, if everyone shares the same conditions, the contribution of environmental factors to IQ variance will go down and thus yielding higher heritability. The opposite is true for varied conditions. 4) In addition, heritability requires variability to make any sense. Traits that are 100% genetically controlled, but do not show variance (say, number of heads) are not defined. This again highlights that one cannot conflate heritability with genetic control. Ok, you may ask, but what about twin studies? There is evidence that e.g. identical twins have more similar IQ values than fraternal ones, for example. But even this situation is not straightforward. For example older studies from Soviet times showed higher heritability of IQ than conducted in Western studies (Elena L. Grigorenko Nova Publishers, 1997). One interpretation was that environmental conditions (in economic and schooling terms) under the Soviet regime were much more restricted and less varied than in the Western world at that time. Another issue is that in order to conduct a "proper" twin studies for this purpose, the twins would have had to be assigned to very random environments (spanning the variability found in a given test population). This is usually not the case. But the issue is actually far more complex, which I shall discuss in a follow-up post (and adding references) once I find more time and if there is interest.

Clinical cytogenetics is an approach, not a career or job per se. In that area there are different type of jobs ranging from technical personnel to the people running a diagnostic lab. One could work within health care providing units as well as independent contractor labs. Your responsibilities would vary depending on position as well as type of the lab. E.g. as a technician/analyst your responsibilities would be more on doing the analyses and maybe training junior staff as well as providing reports for supervisors or other health professionals. Patient interactions is usually absent. For that type of work usually at least a BSc and subsequent certification training is required (details will vary between countries). For most other positions in that area a MD/PhD is required.

The premise is wrong. There are no weak or strong genes and survival has only a secondary relevance. There are only variants that are a) beneficial, b) neutral or c) detrimental for reproduction under a given set of conditions. The latter can and does change and thus altering the selective pressure that shape genotypes. And on top of the whole thing there are stochastic events that also affect the genomic landscape though not in a structured manner.

I am just wondering Is ethanol a significant source of contamination?

Per definitionem all third world countries were not aligned with communism. I have not heard that they all of them were automatically more free and prosperous. One might think that there are more things going on.

A lot of things to go through I will address some merely off the top of my head but would have read up for some more details myself. As a general preamble I would like to mention that the field of artificial organs is still developing and there are wildly different approaches and rates of success. Since I am no specialist I can only cover a tiny segment and mostly from a biological perspective. 1) Scaffolds have different requirements for different types of tissue or organs. However, one approach is to use (micro)fabrication method to get a scaffold with biocompatible plastics and let cells differentiate on them. Depending on the complexity it can be a fairly straighforward mould or it may require precision lithographic methods. 2) I do not know the precise way they created the trachea but I assume that they essentially coated a scaffold with stem cells from the child (I could be wrong though). For example you could take a donor trachea, strip it of living cells and then replace with other cells.Another approach was to create a plastic scaffold and seed it. The whole system would be like a biocompatible tube, but it would not grow with the rest of the body (complex signaling processes would be needed in while the cartilage is built and I do not think anyone has been able to replicate that, much less control it). 3) Trachea are very simple, essentially flexible tubes. A bladder is basically an inflatable balloon Most organs have to carry out complex functions that require muscle movement, complex liquid (blood) control, filtering processes etc in a highly coordinate matter. The issue is less the 3D , but the functional part. 4) AFAIK the basic idea is to use stem cells as seed. But again, this approach is still in its infancy 5) AFAIK no complex artificial organs have been successfully produced using the receptor's cells. Current artificial implants are usually prosthetic devices so we do not really know how a complex cell based artificial organ would perform over time. While the development is ongoing and interesting, it is clearly not on the level that we can just create an organ in the lab just yet.

Is it the ideology or the authoritarian dictatorship? If we talk about casualties relative to the world population (a fair measure if we want to look back into history) we could for instance look at the famous An Lushan rebellion (uprising against the Tang dynasty in China. During the course of about 10 years somewhere up to 30 million people died (lowest estimates are around 10-15 million) which amounts up to 15% of the total world population at that time. Or the takeover of the Ming dynasty by the Qing with over 25 million deaths (ca. 5% of world population, though it admittedly took something like 50 years). And these are only examples from wars in China (as I happen to have books within reach). I think you underestimate the abilities of human to decimate each other regardless of philosophy, religion, ideology or economic system.

Hmm, do we normalize by individual or by biomass?

In cases like this (i.e. wildly misleading title in the news section) wouldn't it be appropriate to change the title?

I actually do think that most agree that the quality of education one receives pre-PhD is more dependent on the student rather than the school (if we disregard potential extremes, e.g. schools with no practical courses for natural sciences and suchalike). The training as a PhD student is far more specialized and highly lab-dependent in natural sciences. There the group is more relevant than the school. However, research-oriented studies will be funding-dependent and if you are a student in a teaching uni with no funds for high-end equipment, you will not receive technical training or expertise in them. As I mentioned earlier, one cannot conflate undergrad with grad training.

Actually, I am not even sure whether a pure meat diet would be bad per se (as in being toxic) just less healthy than a more balanced diet. The linked article does a bad job in interpreting the study they cite and even the the study itself is not without issues (the smoking is a gross exaggeration, for that matter, although effect size is a bit tricky to calculate). Just to make a point, the cited study also found that low-protein intake may be actually be hazerdous for older adults. They found for example that at least 10% of the calorie intake should be proteins for adults older than 65 to minimiz IGF-1 loss for example. In summary the associations are indicative for certain metabolic functions that we are still uncertain of and are somewhat age dependent. It would be hard to make the case for toxic effects as known for tobacco smoke. Edit: I overlooked that the the point was made earlier already.

You cannot simply dismiss numbers that you dislike. The trade volume (both ways) between China and the EU is about 433 billion euro, between Russia and EU 335.9 billion euros in 2012 (in goods only). The respective BRICS volume are lower (total volume of all trade within the same year was about 300 billion USD). Cutting off the European trade (US trade is much lower for Russia, but is much more significant for China and Brazil) would create a huge deficit that the BRIC countries would simply not be able to absorb, unless they suddenly triple or quadruple their trade with each other. And it does not really matter if the values are given in Yuen, USD, Euro or Pesos. You just use the thing called conversion factor (which incidentally put one Yuen at 0.15 USD).

Due to the fact that empathy and social behavior is found in other animals as well. As you may have noticed, the reference I presented earlier was about the evolution of empathy. It s not something exclusive to us humans. So unless you want to point out that animals are religious, I am pretty confident that empathy has a longer history with us.

Seems like a typical Venter project. Massive technological upscaling, but little in terms of hypothesis driven research (or in gaining fundamental insights, despite claims). I assume something will come out of it, but i would not be surprised if they face similar issues as other high-throughput database projects.

Nope, if you overcome these emotions it it will be due to mechanisms like habituation or conditioning, but not by merely applying logic. I f you go bungee jumping the first time your logic will tell you that the chances of accidents are low and you are nicely secured. Still, your adrenaline will speak. Similarly, if you see other someone getting harmed you will wince (or, if you have good self control, it will require a PET scan to reveal brain activities that emulate getting harmed yourself). Unless you are a psychopath, of course. Fears, empathy and similar emotions are deeply embedded in us and while we can overcome them e.g. by getting desensitized, it does require quite some efforts. As such indoctrination is a much more suitable mechanisms to overcome empathy. The overall point however, is that social behavior and empathy are much more deeply rooted than religion.

I am not sure how plasma is going to help. Greg's proposal makes more sense to me.

Yeh, and with sufficient training you may advance to: "why are the grad students so ignorant" and eventually graduate to, "why are the PhDs so bloody daft?".

Some official statements have been issued, it seems http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/845914.shtml#.UxSrlfldXKt

I would be surprised if China actively tries to get involved in it. Unless they have some significant investments into the Ukraine (which I really do not know), there does not seem to be any benefit to side with either of them.

Science disagrees with you. There is a large body of evidence describing empathy in numerous social animals, including humans. This also includes lack thereof and association with certain personality disorders. A review on evolution of empathy: Decety Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2011 Aug;1231:35-45. Take a look at the abstract:

And that is why science does not care what you believe.

Serovar is the same as serotype. KW is a means to distinguish them in a clinical context, but their use in terms of taxonomy has changed quite a bit from the original proposal by Kauffmann. I.e. each serotype was originally considered a species. What you quote however, is at odds what you ask. The quote states that you cannot differentiate within serovars/serotypes. S. ser.Typhi (serovars are capitalized and non-italicized) and S. ser. Enteriditis are, as the name implies, different serovars. What it means is that strains within a given serovar cannot be distinguished.

So in that case we are talking about at least one step-analyzed data, which can be quite a different beast depending on the analytical technique (serial X-ray crystallography comes to mind). I am more open to that, but again, I do find nucleic acid data the easiest to handle. I do agree in many ways that re-analysis of data is valuable and i would put biomarker research pretty much in the front for this (at least when it comes to validation purposes). But again, for some of our projects we had to send out data using terabyte harddisks to collaborators, because it was simply not feasible to transfer that amount of data in a timely fashion otherwise. I actually do agree with microscopic image issues, but that opens up another can of worms. You could substitute best image with best set of images and the issue would not go away completely. The only way would collect all data in an unbiased way, including runs and examples that you may consider as failed. While they may contain information therein, the flipside is that there would be even more data to sort through and avoid spurious associations. As it is now, crap is already abundant in published studies, if we add everything to the mix I am not sure how look through all of them. I would maintain that this more appropriate for strong, high impact claims (in which case a more thorough review is more appropriate than yet another me too paper). I am not arguing that data should not be made available, but my main gripes are a) who is paying for the infrastructure and maintenance of the repositories? Grants certainly do not provide me with funds to do anything more than the experiments (and often barely so) and b) what would be a good system to make the sets useful for a range of applications so that we do not intellectually masturbate over data that is actually the result of bad experimental design? Biological studies are often so diverse in the way we try to tease out functions that trying to pulling differing types of data together is not working very well (and I could launch into the whole systems biology rant, but I will refrain myself here). Again, I am all for sharing data, but at least in my field the infrastructure is not there yet.

Actually I am not clear from the above post whether you are talking about the tiffs or the sequence. Although since you mentioned microarrays, I assume you mean the images or one step below, intensity traces. While I do agree that there is some value in it, even for simple things like using new normalization methods (or maybe improved image processing if we talk about the real raw here), it gets incredibly unwieldy if you run a lab that relies on high throughput instruments and methods. I do see both sides of the argument, although I still think that our ability to generate data has way outpaced our ability to keep them organized and accessible. The organization for DNA/RNA sequences is relatively straightforward, but it can be incredibly complex when moving to quantitative information on other biomolecules where massive deconvolution is done (e.g. metabolite/protein data,to some extent also RNAseq in this context). There have been all kinds of attempts to standardize elements (as e.g. MIAME), but often times biology is too exploratory to conform to them in a neat way. There have been proposals from various agencies to create the infrastructure that would at least allow hosting of that data (although I am not really sure how the discussions about funding have progressed) but especially for quantitative data I am always concerned that the biological part (including e.g. cultivation and manipulation) is often neglected and makes cross-study comparisons exceedingly difficult, which could limit the value of raw data repositories (again, depending on they type of information you wish to extract, and to some extent one could make that point for the majority of biological research). Quite frankly, I have no idea what a more or less unified platform would look like, without messing everything up.

That is probably just a minor point, but I think that only young earth creationists believe that the Earth is a few thousand years old. Crationism basically just stipulates that all organisms are created as they are and reject the notion of evolution (which has equally been shown wrong).