Eric Turkheimer

After several recent visits to extraordinarily busy hospitals and clinics (I am fine), my conclusion is that on the list of what is keeping the economy going, #1 may be AI, but #2 is keeping baby boomers alive.

The first song on Taylor Swift's album is obviously evoking Shakespeare, with some mentions of Dylan. But the real (unlikely, I know) reference is to Robert Hunter: You may meet the fate of Ophelia, sleeping and perchance to dream. /
Honest to the point of recklessness, self-centered in the extreme.

The Saturday morning cartoon animation, the porn movie music, the idiotic quiz questions.... Who creates this stuff?

Ah, I am assigned a 1 hour training video this morning. I spend several hours a week doing training and compliance activities. At a university, of course, they don't come with a recommendation for what other activity I should NOT do. Implicit understanding is that I will do it over the weekend.

Prepping for @dgps.bsky.social Methods, few recent papers pushing ctsem and dynamic models in interesting directions

#1 Developmental changes in twin cognitive correlation (ACE) across age, test instrument, zygosity, with @evangiangrande.bsky.social @ent3c.bsky.social et al

osf.io/preprints/ps...

No argument from me. But: the knowledge contained in these PGS is, for now, far less specific than lead pipes. And my point here is to call out claims that modern IQ genomics is going to revolutionize social science (eg Plomin) or revolutionize society (eg The Bell Curve).

Does anyone argue rare variants account for 10% of the variance for intelligence? They have large unstandardized effect sizes, by definition, but because they are rare they don't account for much variance.

/ps If somehow twin studies never happened and we started here: among siblings, genes account for 10% of the variance at the most abstract level, and 2% on the ground, people would have shrugged and said, that sounds about right. The whole modern nature-nurture debate wouldn't have happened.

The Y axis in Figure 2C is unsquared beta coefficients. Perhaps all this will prove useful for basic science, but the practical takeaway is that once non-causal confounds are cleared, we can't really predict human intelligence at anything approaching useful levels.

This study of intelligence in the UK Biobank is typical of a lot of current social science genomics. Impressive technically, and not over-interpreted. But still, a main result gets lost in the sauce. Within-families, the direct-effect polygenic score explains no more that 1-3% of the variance. /1

Unless you have a hypothesis about actual group based dynamics, which is possible but very difficult, then any effect on a group is just an additive combination of effects on individuals.

Does the example of the island with a high incidence of Down's Syndrome help? If you are smarter than be because you carry variant X and I don't, then groups of people with higher frequency of X will be smarter than people who are !X. X either causes smart or it doesn't. (assuming no GxE).

What your DNA – and childhood – reveal about midlife brain health Study of twins finds accelerated biological aging, amplified by early-life disadvantage, is linked to steeper IQ declines by midlife

dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories...

Biological aging predicts midlife cognitive decline, especially in those raised in poverty A new study using twin data indicates that accelerated biological aging predicts cognitive decline from childhood to midlife—especially for those raised in lower-income households. The research sheds ...

Nice writeup on our paper that was recently published in Aging where we found second generation epigenetic clocks predicted cognitive decline in midlife in the Louisville Twins @ent3c.bsky.social @aging-us.bsky.social
www.psypost.org/biological-a...

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In 2009, I wrote a comment about this with former APA President Diane Halpern. Unfortunately in 2009 we were still using the R word. Anyway, I would say in this case Antoni is mostly guilty of talking out his ass about something he doesn't understand, not exactly a surprise. /end

The problem is that the effect isn't genetically symmetrical. There are no genes of large effect for high IQ on the X chromosome or anywhere else, so the same genetic mechanism can't apply. For high IQ, it is the usual undecipherable mix of polygenicity and environmental effects. /2

At the risk of defending someone I have no interest in defending, this story is not as simple as it seems. It is an indisputable fact that there are more males at the very low end of the IQ distribution, because there are many rare X-linked syndromes that confer developmental disability. /1

Protip to undergrads: if emailing my grad student Sophie about working in the lab, opening your email with "Hey, Sophia" is probably not the best approach.

The Founders of This New Development Say You Must Be White to Live There

Link to story:

Just got around to reading the nytimes story about that racist community in Arkansas. As always, their ideology turns out be be based on perversions of genetics.

Thinking about that long talk I posted yesterday, and how most people won't have the time to watch (neither would I). But I am on planes a lot looking for something to do. It would be cool to have a site where we could upload talks for people to download for watching offline during travel.

Sat_208_Dobzhansky_Lecture Dobzhansky Lecture by Eric Turkheimer

My Dobzhansky lecture at BGA: "Theodosius Dobzhansky and the Origins of Radical Behavior Genetics" is publicly available. I talk about the tensions introduced into the field at the difficult border between science using model organisms and human beings. Thanks to BGA for the opportunity.

SSGAC just posted this on the other site. I understand why they need to respond as an organization, but my point was not that individual people should be reprimanded or shunned. It's more that I want to hear how individual SSGAC researchers think about the problems presented by the new companies.

The thing is, in the early days of eugenics, it was more about vague, MAHA-type appeals to being "healthy" than it was about forced sterilization.

The New Eugenics Companies Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection

New blog post: The New Eugenics Companies
(Oops, I meant to say generational health and embryo selection)

That's pretty much it. I don't see my analysis as exactly tilting things to environment as opposed to genes. For complex human outcomes it is very difficult to get systematic causal effects of either. There aren't genes that create good marriages, but neither are there specific environments.

Did Chatgpt mention that it translated your post for me?

Sadly, no.... I looked it up.

Bedankt!

Funny how much it looks like an e-bike