WILLIAM DARAN

"Social science genetics encompasses the longest causal chain in science: from DNA to human culture."

A Love Letter to Social Science Genetics Some people call social science genetics a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences.

Some people call it a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences.

My love letter to social science genetics: communities.springernature.com/posts/a-love...

Beneath the surface of the sum When genetic interactions matter and when they don't

I wrote about gene-gene interactions (epistasis) and the implications for heritability, trait definitions, natural selection, and therapeutic interventions. Biology is clearly full of causal interactions, so why don't we see them in the data? A 🧵:

Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores Our understanding of the dependence of the genetic and environmental architecture of common diseases on age is incomplete. Here, we use longitudinal data to quantify age-dependent genetic and environm...

Excited to share our latest manuscript, "Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores," led by Xilin Jiang: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

I am attempting an explainer thread for the first time here:
(I am usually too exhausted to post one)

Direct effect of genetic ancestry on complex traits in a Mexican population Human populations differ in disease prevalences and in average values of phenotypes, but the extent to which differences are caused by genetic or environmental factors is unknown for most complex trai...

Brilliant paper by Visscher et al.

Populations differ in traits/disease burden. Are these differences due to genetics?

Comparing single variants or polygenic scores between populations is biased due to environmental confounders correlated with the variants.

1/3

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

The AADR Visualizer: An ArcGIS Online Visualizer for ancient human DNA from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource AbstractMotivation. The AADR Visualizer is designed to be a public, user-friendly, web-based graphical user interface for visualizing and filtering ancient

The AADR Visualizer: An ArcGIS Online Visualizer for ancient human DNA from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

A Neuroscientist’s Bold Proposal for Solving Brain Disorders Author Nicole Rust shares 5 key insights from her new book, Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders―and How We Can Change That.

Check out these 5 Big Ideas (audio and text) from my new book, Elusive Cures. All centered around the question: What will it take to treat & cure the most formidable brain disorders?

Thank you @nextbigidea.bsky.social for selecting Elusive Cures to profile.

urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Nurture might be nature: cautionary tales and proposed solutions - npj Science of Learning npj Science of Learning - Nurture might be nature: cautionary tales and proposed solutions

📚 Children who are read to more often tend to have better language skills (r ≈ .35)—but this correlation likely reflects familial confounding rather than causality
See www.nature.com/articles/s41... & @deevybee.bsky.social's classic blogpost: deevybee.blogspot.com/2014/02/pare...

🧵 THREAD: Preprint from @chrisrayner.bsky.social reveals how to fix selection bias in the Norwegian #MoBa study using population-wide registry data! For the first time, we can quantify and adjust for selection bias in this major epidemiological resource.

Spread the good news!
osf.io/preprints/os...

Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Studying the genetics of intelligence measures can help us understand the neurobiology of cognition and neurodevelopmental conditions 🧬🧠

We estimated missing intelligence test scores in @ukbiobank.bsky.social to reduce bias and boost power.

Preprint: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thread 👇

1/🧵 Even more nature-nurture for school performance in
@pnas.org! Nikolai Eftedal examined family resemblance in school performance in nearly 1 million students across their Norwegian relatives. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Every 3 seconds at #TCTeAC

Our paper on indirect assortative mating is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! In it, we provide refined definitions of terms used to explain partner similarity, develop statistical models, and find evidence of surprisingly high social homogamy for education.

Link: doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Nice method using graph theory to take an IBD network and convert it into per-individual continuous ancestry components. These "spectral" components outperform PCA for correction of population structure in GWAS.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Big cities are vibrant hubs of culture, but why exactly is that? Now out in @natcomms.nature.com, we analysed music listening patterns of over 2.5 million people and demographics to examine mechanisms driving cultural diversity. With @researchdeezer.bsky.social @norijacoby.bsky.social

Highlights ⬇

Nucleus Embryo Genetic optimization is here.

Welp, the grifting eugenicists are out in full force... mynucleus.com/embryo

Traits they predict: slipped in there at the end of the list for "Neurological and mental health" is "intelligence". Just so you know.
To be clear: PGD for nasty and often rare monogenic conditions can be really valuable and important. For highly polygenic traits, the efficacy is EXTREMELY unclear.

Key quote: "He started that company with Blake Byers, an investor who has said a significant portion of global GDP should be spent on “immortality” research, including biotech approaches and ways of uploading human minds to computers." Yes, we're in THAT territory.

Yes, a scientific system is like a living organism. You can’t turn it off and think you can just turn it on again…

Genomics pioneer fired from firm he founded: ‘It was not easy to domesticate me’ Kári Stefánsson, who last month left the Icelandic genetics company deCODE, spoke to Nature about his legacy.

Kári Stefánsson, who last month left the Icelandic genetics company deCODE, spoke to Nature about his legacy

https://go.nature.com/3Zehayv

"AI is coming for your job" ya i'd like to see AI drink 11 coffees then have a panic attack

The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.

These people are clowns.

www.notus.org/health-scien...

Brilliant view with warm evening sun and socialisng at #eshg2025 . Day 3 almost done, just left with my final session of 'Mendelian Randomization - concepts and misconception' to attend.

We are hiring!
Want to join my new group at the amazing @uoe-igc.bsky.social and perform ground-breaking studies in reproductive genomics and genomic medicine as a computational genomicist?

Please DM me to discuss this, I will be attending #ESHG2025

elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

What a weekend this spring has brought me!

We've just posted an updated version of our metabolic trait GWAS preprint. The GWAS summary statistics are still the same as in October, but we've included several new follow-up analyses and completely rewritten the manuscript! See thread below for some highlights.
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣📣 New postdoc in biomedical data science available in our lab!! www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50966/

Flexible funding - many research areas in scope + ideas welcome

Check out our group www.inouyelab.org/home

And the awesome Cambridge research environment! @vpd-hlri.bsky.social @uniofcam.bsky.social

How population stratification led to a decade of sensationally false genetic findings Stratification makes environments look like genes

I wrote about how population stratification in genetic analyses led to a decade of false findings and almost certainly continues to bias emerging results. But we are starting to have statistical tools to sniff it out. A 🧵: