Ian Myles, MD/MPH

Take home shouldn't be "playing God with your baby might be net harmful" for a technology that offers no such power. PGS won't maximize your kids IQ, nor risk Autism because these have no *prospective* value. Duping rich people with correlations was the exact mechanism of demise for phrenology.🤷‍♂️

The connection to IVF might be realistic, but the utility of these new companies is - as expected for this author - not. This pretends PGS are vastly more predictive then they are, but cautions they have "trade offs". Reality is the predictive capacities are rounding errors to zero.

Also, it's absurd to think the programmers of these Chatbots won't skew the results for the candidate that will let them pollute the environment, hoard electricity, steal IP, and screw workers.

Notes from Beethoven’s genome Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

YouTube video by Jesse Welles Join Ice

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjGH...

I think it is fair to criticize any diet study lasting less than (say) a year. And if the takeaway is we should never talk about short diet studies, I disagree but understand. But among short-term studies, these results are interesting even if not definitive.

They seem to imply 'if these results hold for a year'. But it is still comparative, ie "if both groups stayed on the diet, 1 is better". I'll concede to you that "if" is unlikely... especially since the participants got the meals for free in the study. The call for long-term follow-up stands tho.

Fair. But that's an issue with how the news hypes health research more than the research itself. Totally agree the focus should be on how to maximize long-term gains, but stretching a study design like this out that long is way more money than the nation is willing to invest.

The authors have an ongoing trial to look the impact of processing versus ingredients. IE all peanut butter is UPF, but obviously some have synthetic ingredients that might make a difference. And the hypothesis is the ingredients drive the over eating... hard to tease apart, but important.

The problem tends to be that interventional trials have to be small numbers and shorter times (or the cost is too high). But when people use population/longitudinal data the detractors say "but you need an interventional trial". We can calculate a post-test prob that UPF are equivalent to MPF, no?

The authors never imply assured long-term results. 100% get the argument that "the window of observation is too small to draw meaningful conclusions". But it doesn't change that *in the same window of observation* 1 diet was 2x as effective.

If the effects don't last, then indeed it will be irrelevant. But running a study like this out for years is a tall ask. I get the data provided are time-limited, but the authors' call for longer evaluations. And they measured fat mass to show a significant loss; So it wasn't water weight.

Right... so potentially promising, but we need to look longer term. Which is what the authors wrote in the paper.

You are correct to say this study doesn't show what the benefits are/might be a year later. But speculation runs both ways there... ie the longterm benefits are unknown (even if unlikely).

All creatine does is increase the pace of muscle growth (for those putting in the work). Same for protein intake etc etc. It won't alter maximal gains or absolve you from having to stick with your program, but it's still a widely used approach.

That's fair, but is a different question. The study is an interventional/crossover design- those are not feasible to run for months/years. If the argument is "we can't extrapolate", then I'll conceed. But its fair to say "over the same period, 1 diet was twice as effective" and call for more study.

If a study showed that you can "double the efficacy" of gaining muscle by using a barbell instead of dumbbells, it would be absurd to dismiss it if the benefit were "only" an extra pound/month. If your goal were to gain muscle, you'd use the barbell, obviously.

If someone has a goal of losing 20 pounds, which diet would you recommend? One that could take 10 months or one that could take 20 months? If you don't think people can stick with the minimal processed diets that long, then go ahead and dunk on it. But "twice the efficacy" is still good.

I suspect an underrated aspect is that every university being cut off with this memo has a research building with the name of a very rich alumnus on the side. That rich person donates politically and has their state's Senator's personal number. Let's hope they voice disapproval.

And no where do we see a defense of the value of admired studies other than studies can be published. There is never a "if not this approach we wouldn't have made this transnational discovery"... it's all "we need this to publish because publishing is all we are good for".

How Critics of Racial Hereditarian Research (Mis)Categorize Empirical Studies: Commentary on Bird et al. (2024) Federico R. Leo ́n Graduate School, Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola According to Bird et al. (2024), racial hereditarian research (RHR) is scientific racism that should be curbed by the American Psychological Association. They presented an RHR bibliography in which I found eight works of Federico R. Leo ́n addressing cognitive performance. The eight studies were animated by a socioecological rather than RHR perspective and two of them explicitly contradicted the racial/hereditarian position. I conclude that Bird et al.’s design of the RHR bibliographic classification was erroneous and counterproductive to their own aims and should be modified. I also suggest alternative ways to strengthen anti-RHR positions.

The Moralistic Fallacy in a Selective Critique of Admixture Regression: Commentary on Bird et al. (2024) Gregory Connor1 and John G. R. Fuerst2 1 Dublin, Ireland 2 Department of Biotechnology, University of Maryland Bird et al. (2024) propose an effective ban on admixture regression research that uses cognitive test scores as the dependent variable. Their core argument is moral and political, but they also offer a scientific critique of the methodology. Many highly regarded admixture regression studies examining a wide range of medical and psychological traits fall within their scientific critique, despite a lack of moral or political salience. Rejecting the scientific legitimacy of admixture regression analysis if the dependent variable is politically sensitive but accepting it if the dependent variable is politically painless may entail the moralistic fallacy.

Applying Rigorous Standards Is Not a Ban or Censorship: A Reply to Leo ́n (2025) and Connor and Fuerst (2025) Kevin A. Bird1, John P. Jackson Jr.2, and Andrew S. Winston3 1 Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis 2 James Madison College, Michigan State University 3 Department of Psychology, University of Guelph In their commentaries on Bird et al. (2024), Leo ́n (2025) and Connor and Fuerst (2025) misrepresent our position as supporting censorship or bans on racial hereditarian research. We explicitly rejected censorship and bans, and we warned against labeling researchers as “racists.” Instead, we argued for the application of stringent scientific standards from relevant disciplines. Connor and Fuerst’s argument for using admixture regression to find a genetic basis for racial differences in test scores is rejected. Their focus on this specific method fails to address the scientific and ethical issues of racial hereditarian research that we raised in Bird et al. (2024).

Two critical comments on our American Psychologist paper "Confronting scientific racism in psychology: Lessons from evolutionary biology and genetics." (doi.org/10.1037/amp0...) were published recently along with our reply. 1/

Nice work. The type of people replying thrive in bad faith debates. The "Im not a race scientist, I just think only Europeans got the correct sun exposure for intellect and, no, I won't be providing mechanistic data", need not be taken seriously.

Even if government were supposed to run like a business, if NIH were a company it would be one of the richest in history *if* it took a corporate attitude towards health care. If the NIH gouged people for the drugs it created, it's stock price would top Apple. Of course, Tapper has no push back.

they can only take what's pure from us if we let them

Then, someone in the Bari Weiss ilk will write something along the lines of "So 'Believe all women' applies when implicating powerful white men like Kavanaugh, but not when exonerating them, huh?"
WaPo and NYT will say "move on" and frame it as a partisan issue as if her testimony was truthful.

The play is obvious: coach Ghislaine Maxwell on what to say, have her testify that POTUS did/saw nothing wrong, implicate a few enemies of the admin, pardon her "for the courage to speak up", then watch GOP align on the claim that "we don't need the files since we heard from the horse's mouth".

I think you would need to consider the extraction process. Getting from corn to HFCS is more involved than getting sucrose out of a sugar cane. So I'd agree that sucrose is the same molecule no matter its source, but don't think you could assume sucrose will be the only relevant molecule.

Well deserved!

Any semi-functional party would link the issues!
"Republicans want an America only for the rich. That's why they cut healthcare, defund education, ignore housing costs, & slash taxes only for the 1%. They worship the rich so much they'll let them get away with anything... including ped*philia!"