#10 "Autism Study Reveals No Genetic Associations" is pretty interesting though probably reflects heterogenous population more than no actual causal mutations
That reads like a press release. It doesn't read like a serious scientific discussion of genetic findings. I know a lot of genetics researchers (mostly behavior genetics researchers.) I'll provide examples below of how the actual scientists write.
Eric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website.
I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research.
An interesting review article,
Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5
admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers.
"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.
"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."
The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:
I used to work for a biotech company that shared a somewhat similar field to 23andme, although aimed at prenatal diagnostics. We were doing the exact thing that #3 on their list claims. While I am not a scientist, my understanding is that the 23andme has a reputation for being very sloppy at science. It's perhaps useful as a source of personal information but I wouldn't trust anything they talk about, as far as research goes.
Point in case, the whole 'noninvasive prenatal diagnostics' thing was something we had down to a commercial clinical procedure... in 2011. In fact we had it down pretty good in 2009 (before I was at the company), but it takes a long time to get through certification with these sorts of tests. My understanding is that research groups had been doing that sort of thing since 2004 - I don't know when the first human fetus was sequenced but it was certainly not last October.
Does anyone know of any 23andme like service in South East Asia?
When I was in NY, I sent my sample kit from NJ (They don't accept kits from NY). But they never got, but it was too late for me to resend because I moved out of USA. That was 3 years ago.
I have been looking for alternatives without any luck.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 14.5 ms ] threadEric Turkheimer has recently been president of the Behavior Genetics Association, and he has the very kind habit of posting most of his peer-reviewed journal articles on his faculty website.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm
Lars Penke is another, younger researcher who posts most of his publications on his personal website.
http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications/publications.html
I have the pleasure of meeting many other researchers in human genetics just about weekly during the school year at the University of Minnesota "journal club" Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology. From those sources and other sources, I have learned about current review articles on human behavior genetics that help dispel misconceptions that are even commonplace among medically or scientifically trained persons who aren't keeping up with current research.
An interesting review article,
Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
admits the disappointment of behavior genetics researchers.
"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it's easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.
"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."
The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:
http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Pe...
Point in case, the whole 'noninvasive prenatal diagnostics' thing was something we had down to a commercial clinical procedure... in 2011. In fact we had it down pretty good in 2009 (before I was at the company), but it takes a long time to get through certification with these sorts of tests. My understanding is that research groups had been doing that sort of thing since 2004 - I don't know when the first human fetus was sequenced but it was certainly not last October.
When I was in NY, I sent my sample kit from NJ (They don't accept kits from NY). But they never got, but it was too late for me to resend because I moved out of USA. That was 3 years ago.
I have been looking for alternatives without any luck.