I’ve been curious, for a while, about how our genes affect outcomes. There are kinda two extremes “blank-slate-ism” and “genetic-determinism”. I assume it is always some combination, with a lean in one direction or another.

I know the discussions are politically fraught. But if I understand the summary, your findings lean toward the determinism side. Is that fair? How do you think of the dichotomy? Thanks!

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dash2 8 days ago | parent [-]

> But if I understand the summary, your findings lean toward the determinism side.

Absolutely not. I don't think any serious geneticist is a genetic determinist, in fact it's hard to even know what that means... DNA without an appropriate environment is nothing but a long stringy molecule!

In fact, the main impact of this paper was to help make geneticists aware that genes are confounded with geographic environments. That (plus much other research!) is one reason why researchers are now putting a lot of emphasis on family-based designs. In those, you can get truly causal estimates of the effect of a genetic variant or of a whole polygenic score, due to the "lottery of meiosis" that randomly give you genes from either your mum or dad.

Now you could equally argue that the paper shows geographic environments are confounded with genes. That's true too, though sadly a lot of social science still proceeds as if it wasn't the case.

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amy_petrik 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

the type of maths my man here is saying is along the lines of saying (the average) men are taller than (the average) women, very much true, and there's signal there and there's genetics that make men on average taller... but that's nothing to say that if you pull a random man and a random woman off the street - there's no guarantee the man will be taller.

Whatever genetic signal and influence is found between groups A and groups B, A and B are so highly variable within themselves that none of this is applicable to comparing individuals beyond a perhaps slightly weighed dice.

	▲	dash2 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Your first paragraph is obvious. Your second paragraph is not generally true. Neither have anything to do with what I said.
	▲	jmogly 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I read this in Ali G’s voice

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jjtheblunt 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

doesn't the lottery of meiosis randomly give you genes from each pair of grandparents, thus ending up with one random maternal grandparent choice and one random paternal grandparent choice at each position pair (maternal contribution and paternal contribution) in each cell (of course recursively happening during creation of haploid germ cells within each person) ?

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dash2 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. But if you're suggesting that you could treat differences with cousins as random, the way we can treat differences with siblings, then no, because of assortative mating; e.g. if my cousin's "good genes" came from my uncle, then maybe he married my very rich aunt who left my cousin a large inheritance.

	▲	jjtheblunt 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		:) (wasn't suggesting that)

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Merrill 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Due to chromosome crossover, you do not inherit genes individually from ancestors, but instead you inherit segments of chromosomes containing many genes.

However, the randomness is great enough that first cousins do share approximately 1/8 of their genes, second cousins 1/32, third cousins 1/128 and so on. The rapid decrease of shared genes among relatives in successive generations also means that if mating in a population is really random, the population rapidly becomes homogeneous.

It is only assortative mating which generates and maintains distinctive subpopulations.