In England, 36% of Pakistani marriages are cousin marriages. How does this consanguinity affect health outcomes in England?

A new paper estimates that inbreeding is responsible for 10% of type 2 diabetes cases & 8% of Asthma cases among British Pakistanis. The estimated level of parental relatedness for British Pakistanis is shown below. It should be noted that this is a select group of Pakistanis who volunteer their DNA for research. I'd guess relatedness and the effect of inbreeding in the population are being underestimated.

The think tank @ukonward has published a survey of 47,000 people asking whether they trust others.

Areas with high trust were prosperous and had less crime. They also said, “[an] area where there is a lack of correlation is ethnic diversity."

But that wasn't quite true...🧵 The dataset is publicly available. When I dived into the data I found rather different results.

MSOAs (Middle Super Output Areas) with more white White people had higher levels of social trust.

New study surveying 581 anthropologists and psychologists who work in evolutionary subfields.

They were asked whether there were "Population differences from different ancestral ecologies/environments"

74% said yes. Only 11% said no. Human Biodiversity I the academic consensus Here are the rest of the results and the link to the study.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The GCSE Mystery - new blog post from Simon Wright @Leaveme58694423 and myself.

In the GCSE exam given to almost all 16-year-olds in England, the black-white IQ gap has plummeted since ~2005. Now the gap is a trivial 2 IQ points.

Is England a utopian, post-racial society? Strangely, whatever has caused the gap to shrink on GCSEs has not affected attainment on any other test.

In the A-level test given to 18-year-olds, there's still a large black-white gap. At university there are also large racial gaps.

New paper from me and @KirkegaardEmil: National Intelligence and Economic Growth: a Bayesian Update.

National IQ strongly correlates very well with GDP per capita. We ask whether national IQ is the best explanation of economic growth and whether it is causal.

We say yes! 🧵 How do we know whether IQ is the best predictor? We need to test it against many other theories - institutions, culture etc but they can't all fit in one model!

So we use 'Bayesian model averaging', running hundreds of thousands of regressions and taking a weighted average.

New blog post - Dysgenics by the Numbers: Quantifying the Fall of Civilization.

After looking through the literature I estimate that the global average IQ will reach 74 by the year 2100. How do I get this number?

My prediction combines the rate of genetic decline within nations (0.6 IQ points per decade) and the rate of dysgenics between countries.

Low IQ countries have a much higher fertility rate which will take a while to fall to the replacement rate.

New data from Scott Alexander shows that the birth order effect is very real.

Looks like it is due to nurture:
- birth order effect is the same for related and unrelated siblings
- birth order effect diminishes with a larger age gap

Thoughts below 🧵
astralcodexten.substack.com/p/birth-order-… - Falling fertility has led to better investment in children, compensating for dysgenic decline
- You should consider diminishing returns to children in fertility choices
- You can improve judgement of your partner's genetic quality, looking at the success of the older sibling

Interesting article about embryo selection.

What have I learnt from this article? 🧵

First - the media doesn't (care to?) know that this is eugenics. They (prefer to?) think eugenics just means genetics + evil. We should keep it this way.

bloomberg.com/news/features/… This was the most interesting part of the article. Genomic Prediction and Orchid don't offer selection for IQ to avoid backlash. But motivated parents can do this themselves in a sort of DIY fashion and it's cheap too. Sounds like the start of a black market.