Thread by @ent3c

Still thinking about Peter Visscher's essay and reply. The last point in his reply accuses GWAS skeptics of moving goalposts. This takes some chutzpah on the part of the GWAS community. A thread: /1

You may be able to accuse someone of moving goalposts, but not me. I was kicking field goals on this subject in 1998, when GWAS was a twinkle in human genetics' eye. /2

I wrote two long chapters referencing Visscher's work in 2011. Given the date, they were pretty accurate about where we were headed. /3

Self-citation aside, the point is that GWAS-world has been moving goalposts since the inception of what was originally called "molecular" behavioral genetics. It has been conveniently forgotten that the point was supposed to be finding the genes that explained heritability. /4

Linkage analysis was supposed to find the genes for human intelligence, but it didn't happen. /5

Then candidate gene studies were supposed to find them, but that didn't happen either: /6

Then GWAS was supposed to find them. How is that going? Quick, what were the top five SNP hits in EA4? What genes are they near? If you don't know, it is because the field has quietly stopped caring about actually identifying genes. /7

Remember all the ballyhoo about "biological annotation" in EA3? That is the next thing to quietly disappear. Once we got to, "education appears to have something to do with the brain," there wasn't much else to say. /8

So now it comes down to prediction, which is reaching an asymptote, and Mendelian randomization. These may yet be useful for social science. That's fine, but it is difficult for investigators to forswear Plominesque boasting about the sweeping importance of genes. /9

And that's the problem when Visscher, who (it goes without saying) is a brilliant statistical geneticist, argues that genomics is going to inform social policy or be applied to education. His own science shows that it won't, and shouldn't, except in very limited ways. /10

And unfortunately, in this field in particular, overenthusiastic claims about the importance of our own work- something we all do- gets picked up by the wrong crowd. Anyway, it is GWAS-world that has moved the goalpost, not the critics. /end