Apologies for not posting anything recently. I have something in the works at BigThink and a few more in the pipeline but it has been hard finding the time to blog recently. I hope to be back to it in a couple of weeks.
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“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”. The insightful Inigo Montoya. Epigenetics is a word that seems to have caught the public imagination. This is especially true among those, both in science and without, who decry what they see as genetic determinism or at least an overly “genocentric” point of view. Our genes are not our fate, because epigenetics! Such-and-such disorder is not really genetic, because epigenetics! Acquired characteristics can be inherited, because epigenetics! The trouble with epigenetics is that the word means very different things in different contexts. Each of them may be quite valid, but when these meanings are conflated or when the intended meaning is not specified, the word becomes dangerously ambiguous. This is especially evident in the fields of behavioural and psychiatric research where the term is much abused, often, it seems to me, to give an air of mechanistic truthiness to ideas that a...
What if we’ve been thinking about the genetics of intelligence from completely the wrong angle? Intelligence (as indexed by IQ or the general intelligence factor “ g ”) is clearly highly heritable in humans – people who are more genetically similar are also more similar in this factor. (Genetic variance has been estimated as explaining ~75% of variance in g , depending on age and other factors). There must therefore be genetic variants in the population that affect intelligence – so far, so good. But the search for such variants has, at its heart, an implicit assumption: that these variants affect intelligence in a fairly specific way – that they will occur in genes “for intelligence”. An implication of that phrase is that mutations in those genes were positively selected for at some stage in humanity’s descent from our common ancestor with apes, on the basis of conferring increased intelligence . This seems a fairly reasonable leap to make – suc...
Mental illness is surprisingly common. About 10% of the population is affected by it at any one time and up to 25% suffer some kind of mental illness over their lifetime. This has led some people (many people in fact) to surmise that it must exist for a reason – in particular that it must be associated with some kind of evolutionary advantage. Indeed, this is a popular and persistent idea both in scientific circles and in the general public. (See the recent article “ Depression’s Upside ” from the New York Times Magazine, for example). Such theories come in two main varieties – the first, that mental illness confers some specific advantage to those afflicted; and second, that the mutations which cause mental illness in one person’s genetic background may confer an advantage when they are in a different genetic background (balancing selection). Both of these suffer from some misconceptions about how evolution by natural selection works. The intuitive appeal of the “survi...
Looking forward to seeing your BigThoughts :)
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