Statistical geneticist | Associate Prof at @DanaFarber / @harvardmed / @DFCIPopSci | Blogging at https://t.co/4D7UObBNdd
4 subscribers
Start with two populations undergoing neutral drift but with no frequency differences on the alleles that influence the trait (i.e. no genetically causal population differences). 
The fact that these guys were able to cook up a simulation that "disproved" a hypothesis that any intro genetics student knows is TRUE is a testament to how much nonsense people can get up to on here with a poor grasp of R and ggplot. 
The vast majority of the NIH budget goes towards funding research proposals in some form. I walk through the grant review process but the takeaway is that proposals are evaluated by groups of scientists on importance + rigor and most proposals *do not get funded*. 
Accurately detecting loci under selection is complicated by three main factors: neutral drift (which adds noise to allele frequencies), gene flow (which can hide or falsify frequency changes), and background selection (which induces more drift and temporal covariance). 
The specific claim in the article was that genetic variants for intelligence "predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score", unlike for height. This is true today and it will remain true, because the heritability of IQ is much lower than that of height. 
First, a few reasons to write this. 1) The online IQ discourse is completely deranged. 2) IQists regularly invoke molecular heritability as evidence for classic behavioral genetics findings while ignoring the glaring differences (ex: from books by Ritchie and Haier/Colom/Hunt). 
Low skill labor will become worthless, attempts to increase the minimum wage will backfire. In the not-too-distant future, people with low IQ will be a ”net drag” on society. 
Let's define some terms. Race is a social categorization of people into groups, typically based on physical attributes. Genetic ancestry is a quantification of genetic similarity to a reference population. While correlated, they have fundamentally different causes & consequences. 
The first study in 2011 into the heritability of IQ using molecular genetic methods found moderately high estimates 40-51%. But this approach was flawed technically (estimator bounds and population structure) and conceptually (environmental confounding). 
Most common traits in humans are driven by tens/hundreds of thousands of genetic variants of small effect, so we are interested in dominance heritability i.e. the contribution of *all* of these non-additive effects together, which we can contrast with the additive contribution.
Limitations: someone looked at environmental assumption violations 24 years ago so we never have to think about it again. Also, we won't even mention AC interactions, and we'll cite Purcell 2002 in a weird way so no one can find it. What do you call this act? Behavioral Genetics! 
A preface: if you're generally interested in population genetics it's better to learn from first principles, and I've linked some useful resources to that end (many free). In particular (spoiler) recent evolution excludes some of the more interesting concepts and personalities. 
