lmao

In some ways, this seems to explain the election of Trump.


https://twitter.com/conradhackett/st...94498852069376

I.e., voters could be convinced by a mosquito to be worried about Hillary the shark. "Look at the giant gnashing teeth on that beast. Could you ever trust that? MAGA."

Snails? Are they choking on them?

Come snails are venomous

Apparently it's as a vector for infections, same with mosquitoes. Who knew.

Do not fix this.

10 fatal wolf attacks per year? 100 lion? Color me skeptical.

Ok, time for a little more science of genetics.

Today Steven Pinker tweeted this.


https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1021508342869577728

That's fine, published in Nature with like 80 authors. The abstract states:

So, if I understand that correctly, they've "isolated" 1272 distinct genes that account for 7-10% of the variance in cognitive performance among individuals. So, is that like a 2 point IQ difference?

Now, consider evolution. One might be able to tell some BS story of the type so beloved by armchair evolutionary biologists that people in Africa (who, again, show major genetic variation) lacked the selection pressures that caused their Asian counterparts to develop "better" cognitive functions. Can one tell that evolutionary story for 1200 distinct genes, a sample that accounts for maybe 10% of "cognitive performance"? Were the evolutionary selection pressures for this subset of genes (or, say, the assumed superset of, say, 10k genes that account for most of "cognitive performance"), all in the same direction that selected for Asian "cognitive performance" over African "cognitive performance". That would be pretty damn incredible from an evolutionary standpoint. One would seemingly expect differences in these 1.2k or 10k genes to vary randomly among the populations, such that the "higher cognitive performance" variant was as likely to be found in one population or another. (And, one wonders what sorts of significant uni-directional variation could take place over say, 50-100k years, a pretty limited time scale but about the longest possible period since the common ancestors of groups were cohabiting.)

Again, to the point that there is actually real science being done on the question of the genetic basis of intelligence (even ignoring some significant potential questions about the linked study), and not simply the uninformed musings of conservative poly sci majors, it seems to point pretty solidly in the no genetic basis for observed differences in intelligence between racial groups.

Wookie, you're probably more current on this stuff than me. Any thoughts?

[Of course, the study is directed to genetic differences among individuals and not "race" groups, so the observed genetic difference could exist within all racial groups. My main point is that even as race is a scientifically dubious category, it's likely even more coherent than "cognitive performance" (which is of course just a proxy operational definition for "intelligence", which has no definition).]

BTW, I believe the majority of "cognitive performance" is likely genetic (assuming a minimally, or sufficiently, enriched environment.) I just don't believe that the relevant genetic differences in thousands of genes will be found to vary in any consistent manner across racial groups, particularly when the members of alleged racial groups are pre-defined (i.e., prior to testing of "cognitive performance") and are drawn from actually different environments (i.e., not just descendants from West-Central Africa living in Georgia, or even the US), where massive environmental effects can actually be minimized.

I believe you are understanding correctly. That there is a significant association but one that leaves a lot of the variance unexplained is pretty common in this kind of research, although Conley makes a reasonable argument that we ought to expect the percentage of the variance explained by these kinds of studies to increase somewhat over time as the methods improve. Not just for IQ but for measurements of the significance of polygenic traits in general.

That book is probably already out of date but it's a useful introduction to how some of this genetics research works, and it also tackles (again) what's wrong with conclusions Murray reaches in the Bell Curve, not just on race but on the idea of a "genetocracy" in general.

Whatabout deaths from grizzlies at schools? Nobody talks about that but you see what's happening.

Here's a non-downloadable copy of the full article pdf. (It's only 5 pages, so they can be saved as screenshots).


https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1021508461547462657

Sounds like a challenge.

They also made an FAQ.

What's hard to believe? I was a little surprised that there were 10 fatal wolf attacks per year, but I think those Euro/Russian wolves kill people once in a while - pretty much unheard of in North America afaik. 100 by lion is something I've heard before.

I'm late to the distance running talk, but the important thing to remember is that, in the easiest sport to scientifically study, actual scientists have nfi why east Africans are so dominant. The closest they can come is that the average east African is slightly skinnier than other populations, which obviously doesn't come close to explaining the gap. No natural v02 max advantage, no slow twitch muscle edge.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26589124/

Tl;dr the idea that there's a genetic basis for east African distance running dominance has as much scientific basis as the people in the 1920s who claimed reindeer milk gave Scandinavian runners (who dominated the sport pre-African dominance but are now mostly irrelevant even at the European level) an insurmountable edge.

They haven't identified 1200 different genes responsible for intelligence. SNP = single nucleotide polymorphism, so those are individual point mutations, many of which may fall on a single gene locus, and many may fall on intergenic regions (theses may be significant because they could be unannotated genes, or because they may regulate genes, or because they could be transcribed into noncoding RNAs, and of course many could be false positives).

There are a lot of known weaknesses to the approach used here, mainly that lots of **** is invisible to anyone using strictly this approach. They only can confidently look at a subset (a majority, but still a subset) of single nucleotide events. Events like insertions, deletions, translations, inversions, and others involving more than 50 nucleotides are usually invisible. These so-called structural variants are a minority of the event to event differences between people, but the majority of the nucleotide differences between people fall on structural variants. We are seeing now examples of even easy things like Mendelian diseases that this approach couldn't find the causal variant of, because the causal variant was a structural variant and not SNP or SNPs.

I don’t understand those posts that well but one thing I can say is those 500 people who got killed by a hippopotamus don’t live in my neighborhood.

That's what the hippos want you to think.

I was literally just watching that segment as reading that.

I really enjoy the excuses these giant cuck pussies make. He was faking an attack with his butt to make someone gay.

His fear of guns are nonsense. I certainly hope he never has guns fired at him and his family for real so he would then have something to be scared of.

Hippos are famously territorial and aggressive. Cute as all get out, though.

Eeak.

If some ******* has an endowed chair at Harvard to study phrenology it's probably a better use of time to find some old tweets of his that are arguably pedophilic than to actually read his papers

The real takeaway from that paper is that the "intellectual dark web" is complete bull**** and legitimate journals will publish controversial stuff like the heritability of intelligence if there's quality science to back it up.

Trump advisers quietly begin thinking about 'life after Sarah'